AAP Joins Effort to Standardize Digital Content Access

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has announced it has joined the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP). According to the AAP, ACAP is developing and piloting a standard system which allows publishers to express digital content access and usage policies in a language that can be programmed to be recognized by search engines. This is a joint project with the International Publishers Association, European Publishers Council and the World Association of Newspapers.

The project’s goal is to serve as a building block for e-commerce in the online publishing world by helping publishers make their licensing terms and e-commerce information universally readable.

“ACAP’s specification can serve as a win-win-win for publishers, search engines and Internet users, and dovetails nicely with the standard the AAP has been working on for digital content discoverability,” says AAP’s director of digital policy, Ed McCoyd. “The standard under development at AAP will help search engines, retailers and other intermediaries lead users to publishers’ digital book content databases and pages, and the ACAP standard will help make licensing, permissions and access seamless once the user has found the online content.”

McCoyd added that the project “will improve publishers’ ability to make their content available to a larger audience without the limitations currently imposed by the lack of a widely adopted standard for machine readability, and search engines will be able to provide users with access to a much broader array of quality content.”