Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

BBC News has announced that Google is set to Digitise Ancient Italian Books. According to the recent story:

“The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

Up to one million antiquarian books – including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo – will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.”

I am very excited to announce that the book series that I’ve been working on for the past year+ has officially been published today! The Tech Set is a series of 10 practical technology books for libraries that’s been co-published by Neal-Schuman Publishers and LITA here in the US and Facet Publishing in the UK. We also have a companion Tech Set Wiki with extra content for each book and author podcast interviews.

Richard Brooks at the Times Online reports that the British Library will offer over 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from its collection as free downloads this spring.

“Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.

The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books.”

Did you know that the New York Public Library has Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s slippers and Charles Dickens’s favorite letter-opener in its collection? Or that they have a special collection of 40,000 restaurant menus, dating from the 1850s to the present? Robin Finn at the New York Times has written an excellent article about some of the NYPL’s more interesting items in Secrets of the Stacks.

Josh Catone at Mashable has created a useful guide for aspiring authors concerning How to Write a Novel Using the Web. He includes a discussion of various tools for organization, research, writing, connecting with other writers, and publishing.

Google has announced that it is making 1 million public domain books from Google Books available for free download in the EPUB format. “EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices”, so users will be able to view these books on their mobile devices. According to ReadWriteWeb, Google had previously made this massive EPUB collection available to partners Barnes & Noble and Sony, but never to users before last week’s announcement.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper covers some of the changes happening in today’s libraries with Louise Tickle’s Academic libraries are undergoing a quiet revolution. The article proposes that “Being a librarian these days is all about technology and customer service; no time to stick your nose in a book”.

“Applying for a job in a university library because you “love reading” isn’t going to get you very far these days. These hallowed repositories of academic knowledge have changed beyond recognition over the last decade, and the people recruited to work in them have to be willing to embrace new technologies and customer service with an alacrity that would likely horrify the shushing custodians of the past.”

Sam Dean at OStatic rounds up five free online books to help newbies get up to speed with OSS with 5 Free Online Open Source Books for Beginners. “They introduce basic concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), and the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.”

ReadWriteWeb takes a look at disruptions in the book publishing business in a two-part post which discusses three big waves hitting the industry including; the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business Part One introduces these waves while Part Two takes a look at what this means for the major players including; readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed talks with Adam Smith, director of product management at Google in this podcast discussion. The two talk about “Book Search, the proposed settlement in the authors-and-publishers lawsuit against it, what it means for academic authors and researchers and so-called orphan works, and fears of a Google monopoly”.

Scribd, a document-sharing community of over 60 million readers, now offers the ability for users to upload and sell their written works through the website. The new Scribd Store offers e-books, research reports, how-to manuals, and even sheet music for sale by its users.

According to coverage by Brad Stone of the New York Times:

“In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.”

Lance Eaton, visiting lecturer of history, English, and interdisciplinary studies at Massachusetts-area colleges and universities, writes for Library Journal about Books Born Digital: The emerging phenomenon of books published first in digital format.

“It used to be that a book was published first as a hardcover, then as a lower-cost paperback. With increasingly tech-savvy consumers demanding instantaneous access to content in various formats, that publishing protocol has in the last decade changed to one in which the book in codex form often remains the focus, but digital “extras” like audio excerpts and e-chapters act as enticements toward the purchase of the hard copy. More recently, a new phenomenon has emerged, one in which a title comes first in digital form and then—if at all—in physical form.”

Kaite Stover of the Kansas City Public Library writes for Booklist about using the Book Clubs application in Facebook to extend the library’s face-to-face book club.

The Book Clubs application let’s users set up their own clubs – such as the Book Lovers club which has over 6,500 members – and provides a message board, Wall, and other tools to discuss spotlighted books. From the press release:

“In Book Clubs you can post comments about a book or author, rate or review books, build or search a library of titles, entirely at your convenience. If you choose, you can arrange meetings in person, too, and use book clubs as a place to chat or post club news between meetings.”

Steven Johnson writes about the future of the book for the Wall Street Journal in How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write. In this insightful article, the author poses that new devices such as the Kindle and iPhone are changing the way people read, buy, and write books. According to Johnson, books will become increasingly social and accessible, however this increased access may lead to dimished attention, books being written with search engine rankings in mind, and new distribution models such as paying per chapter.

“Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument…

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

Entertainment Weekly recently reviewed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – a mashup of the Jane Austen literary classic with additional scenes of zombie mayhem by author Seth Grahame-Smith to be released on April 8, 2009. Be sure and read the review for more details as well as the Amazon record for a look inside preview. Know of any other good book mashups? Please leave them in the comments.