Group items tagged

O'Reilly experience w/ digital publishing

espresso in action

The Justice department has opened up an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google's settlement.

"Asus, inventors of the netbook, is about to shake up the ebook world with the arrival of the world's cheapest digital reader"

Adrian Sannier: "Finally, I suggest you burn down the library. All the books in the world are already digitized! Burn the thing down. Change it into a gathering place; a digital commons. Stop air conditioning the books! None of us has the Alexandria Library; Michigan, Oxford [UK], and Stanford [CA] have digitized their collections. What do you have that they don't? Why are you buying new books? Buy digital and let's spend some more time making those things level, flat, and transparent so a single search turns up everything we have. This has to change, because it's clear that people want to find information digitally. They want to search for it, find it, have it, and then amalgamate search results into a précis. "

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.

"After years of library membership declining and fears that the public no longer wanted to borrow books, some institutions are reporting a spike in interest since they started to offer e-books. Only a handful of libraries have started to offer the service, but many in the library world are hopeful that the revolution in digital reading can help transform libraries' fortunes, and that the majority of libraries will soon offer downloads as a matter of course, alongside the latest Dan Brown paperback. " [UK focus]