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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

New ALA report explores challenges of equitable access to digital content



ALA recently released a new report examining critical issues underlying equitable access to digital content through our nation’s libraries. In the report, titled “E-content: The Digital Dialogue,” authors explore an unprecedented and splintered landscape in which several major publishers refuse to sell e-books to libraries; proprietary platforms fragment our cultural record; and reader privacy is endangered.

The report, published as a supplement to American Libraries magazine, identifies a number of ways libraries and publishers can collaborate to lessen the digital content divide. Some of the topics covered:
  •  ALA´s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group cochairs, Sari Feldman and Robert Wolven,summarize recent ebook activities and suggest directions for the future.
  • Deborah Caldwell-Stone from the Office for Intellectual Freedom focuses on ebook privacy and related ethical issues.
  • James LaRue offers perspectives from a reader, librarian, publisher, writer, and bookseller on ebooks today and tomorrow.

  You can read the report in the easy-to-use Zmag web browser format, or download it as a PDF for offline reading. Click on this link to read and download the report: “E-content: The Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Unglue it - ebook publishing service launches

Using the tag line Give eBooks to the World, Unglue.it - a new type of e-book servicd-  launched on May 17, 2012 with active campaigns for site visitors to make monetary pledges towards books from five authors they wish to 'unglue'. The idea behind this new service is as simple, as it is innovative, and answers basic questions like the following: What if you could give a book to everyone on earth? Get an ebook and read it on any device, in any format, forever? Give an ebook to your library, for them to share? Own DRM-free ebooks, legally? Read free ebooks, and know their creators had been fairly paid?



Unglue.it as a crowdfunding site, allows book afficinados to pay authors and publishers to make their traditionally-published books free to the world under a Creative Commons license. If supporters pledge a dollar  amount chosen by the books’ rightsholders before a given deadline, these books will be released as “unglued” or free electronic editions under the shared license



There is promise that this concept will catch on and the service will grow as who among us would not want to pledge toward creating ebooks that can be legally free ('unglued') and read worldwide.
The first five authors/publishers to grace the site:

Michael Laser, 6-321


Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch


Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo


Budding Reader, Cat and Rat


Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan.


Source: Unglue.it