Welcome (Back) To O'Reilly Labs

You're probably familiar with the "labs" concept of a dedicated R&D space for projects and products that are still rough around the edges. Google Labs is probably the best known, but there's also Adobe Labs, digg Labs, Reuters Labs, and many more.

A few years back we tried our own hand at it, and came up with some very slick apps built on top of content we'd assembled into a MarkLogic XML database:

A lot has changed since we launched Labs, and so in conjunction with the 2009 Tools of Change for Publishing conference, we're happy to announce the return of O'Reilly Labs, and with it two new projects:

• Bookworm, the online EPUB reader. With Bookworm, you upload and organize your ebooks, and can read them online as well as a variety of mobile devices, including the iPhone. It's open source, and built on top of well-documented and supported frameworks and standards.
• O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI). Exposing product data and information about content is an easy way to encourage others to build cool stuff with your content (the New York Times has been prolific in this area of late). For starters, we've exposed a good chunk of the metadata about our books as RDF.

We look forward to launching more apps within Labs, as well as opening up more of our data and content to outside developers. For now you can keep up with us here on the Labs blog, follow us on Twitter (@oreillylabs), or subscribe to our RSS Feed.