In July The World eBook Fair took place offering more than 330,000 FREE full text books, all in PDF format, all ready for downloading, bookmarking, sharing. We’ve learned that another World ebook Fair will take place in October. It’s sponsored by The World eBook Library Consortia that offers these materials year round for a small fee.
From a news release:
5,000 new eBooks for cellphones are being added this week and this is only 1% of the hoped for 500,000 eBooks being targeted for release on the first day of October in honor of International Book Fair Month. Up from the 1/3 million eBook files offered for download, all free of charge, on July 4, in response to requests of eBook readers around the world, more eBooks were added to include more modern selections via commercial sources and a wider variety of formats, which could total 1/2 million eBooks in October. If all goes perfectly well there will be 1/2 million free eBooks, AND over 100,000 from various commercial eBook sources.
Fast Fact: Approx 30 million ebooks were downloaded during the July book fair.
and speaking of books…Google has worked with the ALA to produce a list of banned books. In most cases the links either take you to snippets or a limited preview, not the full text. Other cases, library holdings. Forty-two books are listed. You’ll find 42 books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course that have been challenged. Banned Books Week begins in 10 days. You can find a list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 and The Top 10 List of Most Frequently Challenged Books via the ALA site. In his Daily Searchcast, Danny Sullivan discusses the Google/ALA deal and wonders if it’s a bit “hypocritical” after Google’s issues in China.
Don’t forget that services like NetLibrary and ebrary and others offer for FREE a few of these, along with many full text books that discuss these titles online, accessible from home or office. All you need is a library card. Actually, ebrary offers a service with over 20,000 full text books that you can read (no limit) online for free. You only pay if you print a page.
We’ve also noticed that some books where you could only find catalog listings on Google were searchable and viewable (in limited amounts, of course) via Amazon.com’s Search Inside the Book.
Bottom Line: It would have been useful if Google would have also linked to some of these resources as well.
Here are a few examples of banned books that you can read and search on Amazon.com:
+ Amazon Only
Amazon: Catch-22 ||| Google: Catch-22Â+ Available at Both
Amazon: 1984 ||| Google: 1984
NOTE: Amazon offers two editions that can be previewed online.+ Amazon Only
Amazon: Lord of the Flies ||| Google: Lord of the Flies+ Amazon Only
Amazon: Beloved ||| Google: Beloved
Amazon offers two editions that can be previewed online.+ Both
Amazon: Brave New World ||| Google: Brave New World+ Amazon Only
Amazon: Gone With the Wind ||| Google: Gone with the Wind
Amazon offers a searchable preview, Google only snippets.+ Amazon Only
Amazon: Cat’s Cradle ||| Google: Cat’s Cradle+ Both
Amazon: A Clockwork Orange ||| Google: A Clockwork Orange
Amazon offers two editions that can be previewed online.+ Amazon Only
Amazon: Invisible Man ||| Google: Invisible Man
Amazon offers three editions that can be previewed online.+ Google Only
Amazon: Separate Peace ||| Google (Snippets Only): Separate Peace
See Also: Speaking of the American Library Association, you’ll now find up-to-the-minute American Libraries News at the top of Ask.com web results pages when searches include ALA or American Library Association. Of course, this is in addition to the organic (1-10 results) you’re expecting. Also, a search for ALA Techsource brings the latest postings from this ALA site. Btw, a search for library news or Library Journal brings back the latest from this publication.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.