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MIT is going to start publishing faculty papers in their own online repository, bypassing commercial publishers altogether.

GoogleBooks: the Settlement A conference report, with comment : "The Google Books Settlement & the Future of Information Access", a conference held at UC Berkeley, August 28, 2009

digital_transition mass_digitization economics new_libraries ebooks

Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. Cushing Academy embraces a digital future.

Stanford

The expression "tipping point" (with its implication of "point of no return") hardly seems to apply, to judge by this year's Book Expo. A more fitting term might be the one used by Ellen Trachtenberg, a publicist for the University of Pennsylvania Press. "We're at a tension point," she told me. "We don't have any e-books, but our board of trustees is keen on doing them, so we are looking into it."

"The ARL has hired two consultants, October Ivins of Ivins eContent Solutions and Judy Luther of Informed Strategies, to study at-risk, peer-reviewed journals with no electronic incarnation or good e-subscription model. The team is assessing 4,000 such journals "to see if there isn't an opportunity for the libraries to help" them survive, Ms. Luther explained. She and Ms. Ivins described the study at a working session of the ARL's Scholarly Communication Steering Committee, chaired by James G. Neal, university librarian at Columbia University, and again at a briefing for the wider meeting."

The future will judge academic librarians by how well they were able to build coalitions across institutions and negotiate with publishers to bring digital books into a co-equal status with physical books.

"The Internet Archive and various like-minded partners have launched an open architecture for selling and lending digital books online, an effort to consolidate the fledgling market for net texts - and give Google a little food for thought. Dubbed BookServer, the open platform is meant to provide a standard means for booksellers, publishers, libraries, and individual authors to serve texts onto laptops, netbooks, smartphones, game consoles, and specialized ereaders a la the Amazon Kindle. The Archive has already demonstrated an early incarnation of the architecture with the Kindle and Sony's Reader Digital Book."