How to search in OPDS catalog ?

[Pierre Timmermans]

Hi,

I am wondering how I could search in a opds catalog from a PHP program. I understood that OPDS catalog support opensearch, but I don't know what this concretely means in term of interfacing with a PHP program. Do I have to make a SOAP request ? Or is there a standard rest interface ? Surprisingly I can't find much on google about that. Can someone points me to the right direction ?

My use case is that I am the developer of a book review site (critiqueslibres.com). On the page of an author, say Edith Wharton, I would like to display the list of ebooks available on some major sites (like for example ebooks libre and gratuit), with a deep link to their site. Ideally the same on the page of a specific book, currently we only link to amazon but I would love to link to gutenberg or another provider of ebooks.

I am just discovering opds (as I plan to buy a ebook reader !) so I maybe miss the obvious

Thanks and regards, Pierre

[Hadrien Gardeur]

Hello Pierre,

OPDS is indeed using OpenSearch to handle search discovery, but OpenSearch Description Documents essentially provide a URI template.

If you know the URI template of a given catalog, you can easily use it to search a given catalog. I'm not sure that I fully understand your use case, but you could for instance:

• search for an author name using the name as a keyword
• filter the results to only keep entries where it matches the author
• then show these results on your page

Best,

Hadrien