Weekly News Digest
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August 31, 2009 — In addition to this week's NewsBreak(s), the editors have
compiled the Weekly News Digest, featuring stories from the week just past that you should know about. Watch for additional coverage to appear
in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view all of this week's Weekly News Digest items.
Google Books Offers Downloads in EPUB Format
Google Books (http://books.google.com) is now offering downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. The company used the Google Books blog to make the announcement (http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-domain.html). By adding support for EPUB downloads, we're hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don't readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we've scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or "reflow") to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won't be tied to or locked into a particular device. We'll also continue to make available these books in the popular PDF format so you can see images of the pages just as they appear in the printed book. For more information about EPUB, visit the website of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the trade and standards association for the digital publishing industry, at www.idpf.org. Source: Google Books
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Paula J. Hane
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