The Berkman Center’s David O’Brien, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey have just posted a 29-page “briefing paper” on the various models and licenses by which libraries are providing access to e-books. It’s not just facts ‘n’ stats by any means, but here are some anyway: “According to the 2011 Library Journal E-Book Survey, 82% of… Read more »
Posts Tagged: ebooks
Eric Frank on open textbooks
Eric Frank is the president and co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, Inc., which publishes peer-reviewed online textbooks available under Creative Commons license. He explains his business.
Michael S. Hart
First, an email from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive about Michael S. Hart: A dear friend and an inspiration unfortunately died yesterday. He dedicated his life to getting books to everyone in the world. He did this with no compensation and lived a life of near poverty. But he always shined with good cheer,… Read more »
Libraries can own the Kindle, but who owns the books?
Mathew Ingram at Gigaom reports on one of the catches in Amazon’s plan to allow libraries to lend e-books on the Kindle: Who owns the books? Since preserving our heritage is one of the key value of our libraries but not of Amazon, there are troubling consequences of turning libraries into distribution sites for corporate… Read more »
Has HarperCollins lost its mind or its soul?
[Note: As always with posts on this blog, authors speak for themselves. - dw] HarperCollins has changed its agreement with the main distributor of e-books to libraries: e-books will now become inaccessible after 26 checkouts. I understand publishers’ desire to limit ebook access so that selling one copy doesn’t serve the needs of the entire… Read more »