Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

An interesting resource about Public Domain works leaning towards art/historical material. Works vary from Ebooks to images and articles are well written it not up to scholarly review standards.

While not a particularly well written or informative article, it is relevant that that debates about eBooks and libraries have now reached journal like The Economist where libraries are rarely mentioned.

With eBooks having taken off in the past few years I was curious about the current status of Project Gutenberg, the original resource of online books. Starting in 1971 with the Declaration of Independence Gutenberg initially relied on manually typing in royalty free books into a text format. The project is still continuing, but the founder died last year and as of July 8th the archive is only 40,000 books, an almost miniscule number compared to the digitization efforts of Google.

Vodafone Romania, in collaboration with a publishing house Humanitas, launched an ambient advertising campaign, which is simply fantastic. A Victoria Square metro station was turned into... a digital library. The walls are being covered with large format posters, from top to bottom. Bucharest commuters who enter the station suddenly discover that they're in an impressive library.

@Sharla can we use this to promote the new Ebsco ebook purchase. . . we just need a big wall!

A somewhat concerning article about how if you visit an area of the world with a mobile device where your eBooks aren't licensed, the Google Play DRM will delete them. This is akin to traveling to another part of the world with a legally owned Region 1 DVD and device to play it on, and it still erases itself.

An overview of how what we read has changed from 2003-2013 as well as reading styles, covering 1993-1998 as a the era of "brick and mortar" stores, 1999-2009 as the "dotcom era" of online sellers still selling physical boos, and finally the present era of eBooks.

An author recounts a success story and what had to be done to self publish a casebook. Unlike fiction or repackaged public domain material this was a large book, 870 pages and nearly 40 megabytes in size. The author also did not used Amazon but Scribd and Gumroad as publishers.

Joseph J. Esposito is an independent management consultant. Kizer Walker is Director of Collection Development at Cornell University Library. Terry Ehling is Associate Director, Project Muse, at the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harvard librarians learned that lesson when they set up Twitter feeds broadcasting titles of books being checked out from campus libraries. It seemed harmless enough-a typical tweet read, "Reconstructing American Law by Bruce A. Ackerman," with a link to the book's library catalog entry-but the social-media experiment turned out to be more provocative than library staffers imagined.

This is not the first time Barnes & Noble has done this sort of "banning" as the author calls it. Last spring they pulled DC Comics because DC was making a deal to only work with Amazon. The comics eventually came back, but it made a pretty big statement. I don't think we've heard the end of this.

"What is social justice? John Vincent cites a definition of social justice as 'every one of us having the chances and opportunities to make the most of our lives and use our talents to the full.'"

Really cool article that looks at : "Espresso Book Machines can offer two kinds of services: print-on-demand of any title available through the EspressNet database (which includes Google Books, the Internet Archive, all of Ingram's partnered publishers, and more) and self-­publishing services for authors and small publishers."

I sincerely love the idea of these book machines and have ever since they've become available. I don't know why every library doesn't have one (aside from cost).

Since ALA President Maureen Sullivan threw down the proverbial gauntlet to publishers and they've picked it up, there's been a lot of inspired responses.  Jamie LaRue has a radical one himself-- circumvent the publishers, and ask the authors how they'd like their electronic books to be distributed. It's a bold proposition (posing the question, "Are publishers necessary?"), but certainly a way for libraries to work with authors to maximize their profits.

"Either the books must go, or they must swallow us up. I calculate that, take the whole world over, from eighty to one hundred thousand books appear every year; at an average of a thousand copies, this makes more than a hundred millions of books, the majority of which contain only the wildest extravagances or the most chimerical follies, and propagate only prejudice and error. Our social condition forces us to hear many stupid things every day. A few more or less do not amount to very great suffering in the end; but what happiness not to be obliged to read them, and to be able at last to close our eyes upon the annihilation of printed things!"

We're at the dawn of the tablet era now. Earlier this month, Apple sold 3 million of its new iPad during the opening weekend, with some analysts expecting over 60 million of the tablets to be sold worldwide. What's more, e-book readers are selling even more briskly than tablets.

I heard today that after the Govmn't sued Apple and 5 ebook publishers for colluding to keep pricing favorable, 3 of the 5 publishers have already settled out of court. I wonder if Apple thinks they have a strong enough case...

And why would they do it?  Probably because as it stands, it doesn't work as intended. As people realize that what they're doing isn't buying content so much as leasing it, it's interesting to see how their attitudes have changed towards DRM. 

This is pretty darn huge.  Keep in mind that Tor says nothing about whether piracy is bad, or whether or not electronic books should be cheaper, or more expensive.  But they do concede with this decision that DRM is more a hindrance than a help.

Interesting news from Overdrive.

This was good and something I need to keep in mind. The original Ten Commandments that most people are at least passingly familiar with represent rules for how Jews and Christians should conduct their lives.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

I realize I should probably be bothered by this some a privacy point of view, but I kind of like the idea that my reading habits are offering concrete feedback. "Dear publisher, this is where the book got boring and I gave up."