Sebastian Luetgert at the closing session of Off the Press 2014
Sebastian Luetgert, a.k.a. Robert Luxemburg, is a theorist and media artist, copyleft advocate, programmer, writer, co-moderator of nettime, member of mikro and Bootlab. His projects include rolux.org, textz.com, project Gutenberg, and Last Tuesday, where people can “exchange mp3 files, beta-test new viruses from Asia or vote for the most stupid new dot-com brand.”. He is also the author of “2 x 5 Years of German Internet” and other texts on the contradictions of the network society. He is currently working on a fictional documentary film set in Dubai.
Sebastian addressed the issues of e-book circulation, which he finds impoverished by the current mediascape. As he went on to explicate, on the internet we can observe two dominating trends: either gigantic, difficult to manage ‘dumpsters’ of files, or personal ‘libraries’ of ebooks, like Calibre. As a proposed solution to this unfavourable status quo, Sebastian introduced his project Open Media Library, which he developed together with Jan Gerber.
Sebastian Luetgert demonstrates the Open Media Library
Open Media Library is a local web application that lets you manage and sync digital media collections. This library software can be described as “something like iTunes for books, with other libraries instead of a store, running in your web browser”. What Sebastian proposes in his project is changing the mindset from peer-to-peer file sharing to archive-to-archive exchange.
The software runs in the web browser and supports EPUBs, PDFs and any other book format for which there is javascript reader, as well as plain text. At the moment there is no stable version of the software and no standalone installer, but users willing to try out the Open Media Library can run it from Terminal(Mac) or PowerShell(Windows), following instructions on the website.
If you want to know more about the project, contact Sebastian and Jan :
openmedialibrary@openmedialibrary.com
irc.freenode.net#openmedialibrary
@opmedlib