Read an E-Book Week Wrap-Up

Thank you for following us during Read an E-Book Week. Hopefully you have found some new Library resources that you can use.

For more about Read an E-Book Week, click here to read an interview with Rita Toews, the creator of Read an E-Book Week.

In addition to ebooks provided by the Troy Public Library, you can find many sources of ebooks on the web, including several that provide free ebooks. Some examples include:

Kobo
This commercial ebook store sells ebooks that can be downloaded and viewed on your computer. Many of these books can be transferred to eReaders. While you have to pay for the majority of ebooks from Kobo, you can find a list of free ebooks they offer here.

Project Gutenberg
Declaring itself as "the first producer of free electronic books", Project Gutenberg has existed since 1971. All ebooks from Project Gutenberg are in the public domain. They are all free, and can be read online. Additionally, the can be downloaded in a wide array of formats, including EPUB, TXT, PDF, and HTML.

Google Books
Google has been conducting an ongoing project to digitize books held in many different libraries. The result of this is Google Books. Google Books provides a variety of titles, both old and new. Many old titles that are in the public domain can be viewed in their entirety. More current titles only have a limited preview available: if you want to read the entire contents, you would have to find the book in a library or purchase it. Google Books also contains digitized scans of many different magazines. For more information, click here.

Have fun reading ebooks, and continue to follow The Tech Desk. We will continue post information about new ebook sources available from the Library and highlight developments in ebooks and ebook technology.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon to Oppose Google Book Scanning Settlement

Not surprisingly, some of Google’s chief competitors – Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon – have joined the Open Book Alliance, opposing the October 2008 legal settlement which would allow Google to digitize and sell millions of books.

The Alliance, headed by the non-profit Internet Archive, has expressed concern about “serious legal, competitive, and policy issues” surrounding Google's book scanning project.

Google reached a settlement last year with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against the Internet search giant in 2005. Under the settlement, Google will pay publishers and authors $125 million. In exchange, the company will resume scanning copyrighted, out-of-print books, and provide up to 20% of the text on-line at no charge, under its Google Book Search program.

In addition, the settlement creates a method for how Google, publishers and authors will share the profits of digitized versions of printed books. The company will take 37% of the revenue, leaving 63% for publishers and authors.

In a statement, Google responded to the latest news saying: "This sounds like the Sour Grapes Alliance. The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition."

Microsoft, which entered into a 10-year Web search partnership with Yahoo! last month that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google, also had a project to create a vast digital library but shut it down recently. Online retail giant Amazon is a major player in the electronic book sector through its popular e-reader, the Kindle.

The settlement still needs the approval of a US District Court judge, who is to hold a "fairness hearing" on the deal in New York on October 7.

For more background, read Learn More about the Google Book Search Settlement.

[via Yahoo! Tech]

Learn about the Google Book Search Settlement at The Public Index

In October 2008, Google announced that it had reached a settlement with major publishers that would end the publishers’ copyright lawsuit against Google Books. In the settlement, Google would pay publishers and authors $125 million. In exchange, the company would resume scanning copyrighted, out-of-print books, and provide up to 20% of the text on-line at no charge, under its Google Book Search program. A final approval was originally scheduled for May 2009.

Almost immediately, opposition arose from some publishers and academic institutions, who were concerned about Google receiving a monopoly over millions of orphaned books – those titles were a copyright holder cannot be found. A federal judge ordered a four-month delay to the settlement, to give time to the U.S. Department of Justice to look into the antitrust implications of the deal.

For those of you interested in this issue – including its impact on authors, booksellers, librarians, and copyright law – you might want to check out The Public Index. This site is dedicated to studying and discussing this proposed settlement. Here, you can browse and annotate the settlement, section-by-section. In addition, you can:

• Study the reading room of lawsuit documents
• Join the conversation in the forums
• Draft an amicus brief to the court on the wiki

The Public Index is a project of the Public-Interest Book Search Initiative and the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, a group of professors, students, and volunteers who believe that the Google Book Search lawsuit and settlement deserve a full, careful, and thoughtful public discussion.

The site’s creators write:

“This is a site for everyone, dedicated to no particular point of view other than the advancement of dialogue and understanding. We hope that the site will help the settlement’s fans and foes dispel misunderstandings and find common ground, and that those who have not made up their minds will find the facts and explanations they need to reach informed decisions for themselves”

Browse Magazines With Google Book Search

Curious about what Popular Science was covering in the 1940s? Are you doing popular music research and are having trouble tracking down issues of Billboard from the 1960s? A great place to look for this information is Google Book Search.

In December 2008, Google Book Search started to include full-scans of magazines. You can search for stories across all magazines, or can browse through selected issues. Some magazines include nearly the entire print run. For example, Billboard has issues from 1942-2008. Some like Men's Health, only include several years worth of issues.

You can access magazines in Google Book Search by going here and clicking on an issue listed under the magazine heading. To search within magazines, click Advanced Book Search, and change the content option to Magazines.

For magazines available in Google Book Search, check out this list from the blog Seeing the Picture.

Google Book Search Settlement Under Fire

Late last year, Google announced that it had reached a settlement with major publishers that would end their copyright lawsuit against Google Books. The settlement would put in place an agreement between Google and existing copyright holders, and give the search giant rights to out-of-print and orphaned works — those for which the copyright holder cannot be identified. A final approval was scheduled for May.

Now, reports ars technica, a judge has it approved a four-month extension of the approval process, as opposition to the settlement is increasing among some publishers and academic institutions, and the Department of Justice is looking into the antitrust implications of the deal.

EBook Readers Compared; Selection Grows

Amazon made news last month when it released its Kindle 2 ebook reader.

Though the best known, the Kindle isn’t the only ebook reader out there. Here is a roundup of the pros and cons of seven of the most popular readers available today, from Wired.

On a related topic, Sony – one of Amazon’s main competitors – has reached an agreement with Google to offer 500,000 public domain titles available from Google Book to Sony’s ebook users. This is the largest collection of any kind available for any ebook format.

Google Settles Book-Scanning Lawsuits

According to an October 28 article in The New York Times – by Miguel Helft and Motoko Rich – Google and book publishers have agreed to a settlement in two copyright lawsuits brought by the publishers against the company.

In the settlement, Google will pay publishers and authors $125 million. In exchange, the company will resume scanning copyrighted, out-of-print books, and provide up to 20 percent of the text on-line at no charge, under its Google Book Search program.

In addition, the settlement creates a method for how Google, publishers and authors will share the profits of digitized versions of printed books. The company will take 37 percent of the revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.

The Times quotes James Gleick, the author of five books and a member of the board of the Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs in the suit: “This huge body of books that were effectively lost to the marketplace are being rescued.”

This is a good thing. In the end, more material will be available to more people, more easily.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, however, not everyone agrees.

In her article, Harvard Says No Thanks to Google Deal for Scanning In-Copyright Works, Jennifer Howard writes:

"Harvard University has examined Google’s recent legal settlement with publishers and authors, and found it wanting…

Harvard’s concerns center on access to the scanned texts — how widely available access would be and how much it might cost. “As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff...

In a statement, Harvard said it would re-evaluate its position as the settlement moves forward."

What do you think?