When the audiobooks feature goes live in November, there will be over 1,000 audiobooks which we plan to purchase from Baker & Taylor (which uses Findaway). We want the catalog to show these audiobooks to patrons, but we do not want patrons to see the Overdrive audiobooks that can't be borrowed or listened to.

Go to a URL like http://opds-browser-demo.herokuapp.com/collection/https%3A%2F%2Fcirculation.librarysimplified.org%2FNYNYPL%2Fgroups%2F63%3Fentrypoint%3DAudio/ and you'll see a large selection of audiobooks provided by NYPL. Unfortunately, pretty much every book in NYPL's audiobook collection is provided by Overdrive and can't currently be played by SimplyE. There are only five or six that can be played. The feed is useless.

This isn't a problem for NYPL because we're just not going to offer an audiobook collection through SimplyE right now. However, it would be a problem for a library that had a large audiobook collection from Bibliotheca (which SimplyE will support soon) plus a large audiobook collection from a currently unsupported vendor such as Overdrive or RBdigital.

Up to this point our strategy has been to put titles in feeds regardless of the client's ability to render them, and let the client decide what to show. The big selling point of this strategy is that we don't have to upgrade all the servers when SimplyE adds support for a new media type. This strategy works for PDFs, where unrenderable content is less than 5% of a typical library's holdings, but it doesn't work when the unrenderable content is the majority of content.

A short-term solution might be to change Lane.only_show_ready_deliverable_works to exclude audiobooks from all data sources except Bibliotheca and Axis 360.

A long-term solution probably involves controlling on a per-collection basis which media should be included in feeds, or controlling on a per-library basis which delivery mechanisms allow a title to show up in feeds.