A new primer by Jane Lee from the California Digital Library.
The article includes the following sections:
+ Content vs. Delivery
+ Reading as an Experience
+ Why e-books now?
+ Control of Content, Control of Distribution
+ Standards and Protocols
+ Will e-books make printed books obsolete?
+ Issues to Consider
Direct to Complete Article (7 pages; PDF)
Source: California Digital Library
Word from Michael Hart, the Founder of Project Gutenberg, that once again this year the World e-Book Fair will take place from July 4th-August 4th. This is the 4th year of the annual book fair. It starts on July 4th to celebrate the 38th anniversary of Project Gutenberg which began on July 4th, 1971.
Once the event begins you’ll find FREE access to over 2.5 million full text eBooks that you can download to your computer. Some titles can also be downloaded and read on certain types mobile phones.
Book Sources include:
Here’s a rough translation of the summary:
The German publishers and booksellers intermediate appeal to the chancellor, “deal with the protection of intellectual property to be personally”. At its Annual Meeting in Berlin, the Association members adopted a resolution today that a global approach to the development of copyright law demands - and support the fight against Google Book Settlement.
Source: TeleRead
In addition to a new theme and user interface, the reader has the following special features:
+ the reader includes unique (and simple to understand) URLs for each page, which update as you move through a book. These URLs can be used in citations and bookmarks, making it easier and more legible when referring to a particular page of a book.
+ books can be viewed in one or two-page mode.
+ in one-page mode, images can be zoomed up to 100% of the original scans. Because the Internet Archive scans are in color, this is an especially nice feature with illustrated books.
+ it has the capability of accommodating books that read right-to-left, such as those books in our Yiddish collection.
+ the reader is supported by all browsers (but IE 6).
+ there is an auto-play feature, so that you can set the pages to turn automatically.
+ As always, the reader is open source. If you have suggestions or bug reports, please add them to the book reader’s launchpad page so the engineers will see and prioritize them.
To test the reader, go to the book’s details page and, in the “View the Book” box, click on the “Read online” link or the animated gif.
Source: Internet Archive / Open Content Alliance
Seven new and updated features and tools from Google Books today. You can read about them here. Here are a few highlights:
Embeds and links - This new toolbar option allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in any of your websites or blogs–all with a simple html snippet. It’s a lot like the embed tag that makes it so easy to share YouTube videos.
Better search within each book - You’ve always been able to search inside books you find on Google Book Search. Now, for public domain and partner books, we’ve made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears.
Thumbnail view - Click on the thumbnail view button in the toolbar to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine
Contents drop-down menu - Above the book itself, you’ll find a Contents drop-down that allows you to jump to chapters within the book–or articles within a magazine.
Page Turn Button and Animation - In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven’t yet finished the page.
Improved Book Overview Page On the Overview page you’ll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.
Source: Inside Google Book Search
Hat Tip: Barry S.
The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce that a new Turning the Pages project has been released on the NLM Turning the Pages Web site.
The project features Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de Arte Distillandi printed in Strasbourg in 1512. The book is a practical manual on chemical, alchemical, and distillation devices and techniques used to manufacture drug therapies, and it features a number of hand-colored woodcuts featuring scenes of laboratories, distillation devices, and doctor-patient scenes. It includes instructions on how to distill aqua vitae, potable gold, artificial and natural balsams and how to use distillates to treat illnesses in surgical cases.
Source: National Library of Medicine
Faculty members at Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, UT, have a new alternative to interlibrary loan (ILL): the Amazon Kindle. The Harold B. Lee Library has purchased three ebook readers for the pilot, expecting the items chosen to be either very new or very popular titles—titles that in some cases the library has been unable to get through ILL.
Brigham Young is one of the first academic libraries to lend Kindles, and while Amazon has told LJ lending is impermissible, its customer service reps have provided more variable advice.
An Amazon rep gave a verbal OK to BYU’s plan, but would not provide a written response, Gerrit van Dyk, the library’s document delivery services manager, told LJ. The rep said that the Terms of Use was sufficient.
A bit more about the program via the Gerrit van Dyk’s Shaping Libraries blog.
Source: Library Journal
UPDATE (6/19): Brigham Young U. Suspends Kindle-Lending Program (via Wired Campus)
Hat Tip: LS
JISC has funded an ‘e-books for Further Education (FE) project to make over 3000 e-books freely available to every college and sixth form in the UK.
Over the next five years, the project, which also received funding from the Learning Skills Council (LSC), will enable all students in FE in the UK to access online course texts to support their studies.
E-books will be made available from the start of the next academic year via the ebrary e-books platform E-books will be made available from the start of the next academic year via the ebrary e-books platform. Subjects will range from Fashion Design to Software Engineering, Health and Social Care to Automobile Electronics, and Beauty Therapy to Practical Lambing. Access will be available whether students are studying in the college, at home or in an internet café.
See Also: UK National e-Book Survey (May 2008) (14 pages; PDF)
Source: JISC
The interest in e-readers, or e-books as they are called now, has reached a fever pitch. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos fields nothing but Kindle questions at the company’s shareholder meeting. Prime View picks up E Ink, the company that supplies the screen to Amazon’s Kindle, for $215 million. And companies ranging from Google to Interead are aiming to upset Amazon’s early advantage.
The complete post contains a chart from a new report from Forrester Research laying out how they believe the market will develop.
Source: ZDNet
From a Blog Post by Michael Hart:
The first goal of Project Gutenberg was simply to reach totals of estimated audiences of 1.5% of the world population, or the total of 100 million people.
With the advent of cell phone [mobile phone] access we are now setting our goal at 15% of the world population or 1 billion.
Given that there are approximately 4.5 billion cell phones now in service around the world, that means we would have to reach just over 1/5 of all cell phone users to accomplish this.
Possible. . .but not likely unless we make it extremely easy!
To this end we will be emphasizing eBook reader programs for a wide range of cell phones.
Given the estimated 4.5 billion cell phones that we could make eBooks for today, presuming they can all display plain eBooks, and the extremely slow rise in Kindle sales as compared to the iPod, iPhone, Blackberry Curve, and all the others, we should be able to reach more readers than Kindle and Sony combined if we just reach one cell phone user out of a thousand. This has to include many more languages than English, of course, so our effort also has to be multi-lingual, if we are to reach anyone beyond the number of people comfortable enough with English to read our eBooks on their cell phones.
Source: Project Gutenberg News
Hat Tip: TeleRead
From Monday 18 May the British Library is giving readers the chance to test drive three e-readers from Sony and iRex Technologies currently available in the UK.
Situated on the 1st floor of the Library’s flagship building at St Pancras, the e-reader display will give visitors the chance to familiarise themselves with these new devices and to freely explore the possible recreational and research benefits of the e-book revolution.
Source: British Library
Amazon Kindle DX, the new purpose-built reading device that offers Kindle’s revolutionary wireless delivery and massive selection of content with a large 9.7-inch electronic paper display, built-in PDF reader, auto-rotate capability, and storage for up to 3,500 books. More than 275,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store, including 107 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers. New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases are $9.99 unless marked otherwise. Top U.S. and international magazines and newspapers plus more than 1,500 blogs are also available. Kindle DX is available for pre-order starting today for $489 at http://amazon.com/kindleDX and will ship this summer.
+ Key Features:
++ Larger Display
++ New Built-In PDF Reader
++ New Auto-Rotation
++ New 3.3 GB Memory Holds Up To 3,500 Books
++ Incredibly Thin (About One Inch)
++ Syncs With Kindle for iPhone and other Kindle Compatible Devices
++ 3G Wireless, No PC, No Hunting for Wi-Fi Hot Spots
As has been discussed elsewhere, It will be interesting to see if textbook publishers start making their content available via the Kindle.
Source: Amazon.com
See Also: Live Blogging of Kindle “DX” Launch Event (via Bits Blog, NY Times)
From the Wall St. Journal article:
Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Beginning in the fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science, and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of the students who are issued the devices and those who use traditional textbooks, said Mr. Gonick.
Source: Wall Street Journal
From a Blog Post by Roy Tennant:
…I’ve followed the doings of the Hathi Trust when they were still known as the University of Michigan and Friends. Why? Because I think it makes a great deal of sense to not rely on Google as our only means to access digitized books. For those of you keeping score at home, the Hathi Trust is a collaborative project of a group of universities to archive and share their digitized collections.
Information on what is available there has been gradually getting better. For a while all that was available were metadata downloads, which I had used last year to create a prototype bare-bones search interface. Then the Hathi Trust put up an experimental full-text search. Now they have just released a new catalog of the digital content in the Hathi Trust. Built using VUFind, the catalog sports a spiffy look and all the features expected of the latest search systems — faceted narrowing of search results, various sorting options, suggestions of similar items, cover art (or title page images of older works), etc.
Direct to Hathi Trust Database
See Also: Learn More About the Hathi Trust
Source: Library Journal
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has collaborated with 127 universities in the U.K. since 2007 to study eBook usage by students and teachers. Analysis is ongoing. Among the preliminary findings from the project’s user surveys and server log evaluations:
+ 64.2 percent of students use eBooks and 52.3 percent obtain them through their university library as opposed to free via the Internet, from a friend or colleague or purchasing it.
+ Most students (57.3 percent) read by dipping in and out of several chapters and spend 11 minutes or longer (75.7 percent) reading an eBook on the screen in one session.
+ Well over one-third of students (42.2 percent) had consulted at least three eBook titles in the month prior to the survey.
+ Only 26.2 percent of university teachers do not recommend or actively encourage their students to use eBook resources.
Direct to Complete Report (8 pages; PDF)
Source: JISC (via OCLC Abstracts)
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