Thanks for the quick and detailed reply Ned. To clarify, I think there are two separate and distinct ways that I’d imagine Pressbooks interacting with Zotero (which could also be genericized to apply to other citation managers).
First, I think there’d be broad interest and utility in making sure that Pressbooks’ metadata conformed to the ingestion expectations of Zotero and other citation managers—what Zotero refers to as its ‘translators.’ This would ensure that Pressbooks published titles could be more reliably added to someone’s reference library in the way that books in library catalogues or amazon or articles from research databases can be. That’s the issue that is described here and here on other discourse forums.
The second way that I could see these bibliographic tools being integrated into Pressbooks is actually a separate issue, and the one I’m interested in exploring in this thread. The idea of the bibliographic management tool is to function as a big library of metadata for objects a researcher is interested in, and to make it easy for that researcher to drop references from that library in their writing/publishing flow in an automated way. Instead of manually writing out a parenthetical citation for some article I’m citing in APA format for one publication and then manually changing it to MLA for another publication, I just insert a reference from my citation management tool and it handles the formatting, keeps track of all the references I’ve inserted into a page or article or chapter or book and then produces a nicely formatted bibliography for me as well. All I need to do is tell it to switch globally from one citation style to another and viola—magic happens. This is a huge time saver for research-based writing and publication, and the first integrations for Zotero, Mendeley, Endnote, and Refworks were with word processors, for obvious reasons. In my view, Zotero is the best of the bunch (because OSS!). Zotpress is the plugin that allows writers to access their reference library and insert references and create bibliographies in WordPress (using shortcodes) in an analogous way to what they might be used to doing with Zotero and Microsoft Word or Libre Office, for example. Adding support for Zotpress in Pressbooks would essentially mean figuring out a way for academic writers to use this tool to better automate their citation and bibliographic creation processes. Does that provide a good, helpful overview of the use cases?