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Sources for Free Ebooks and Ereader Software
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by Paula J. Hane
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In late May, BookExpo America week kicked off with IDPF's annual Digital Book 2011 conference. Judging from the product announcements and buzz from the events, ebooks are hot, hot, hot! Kobo, which partners with Borders, announced that its new $130 E-ink touchscreen reading device would be available in June. Barnes & Noble announced a $139 black-and-white E-Ink touchscreen e-reader. Amazon dropped the price of its $189 3G Kindle with Special Offers to $164. Amazon also reportedly told U.S. publishers that it will begin accepting files in EPUB format in the near future, and these files will be readable on the Kindle. With the acceleration of sales of ebook readers and so much interest in ebooks, it seems as if it's a good time to look at good sources to get free ebooks. I will also discuss free ereader software as an alternative to buying dedicated devices.
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OCLC Web-scale Management Services on Target for July 1 Release
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OCLC announced that 32 libraries committed to using OCLC Web-scale Management Services since it announced that it was making its cloud-based library management services available to early adopters 10 months ago. The early adopter phase has now ended, and July 1 will mark general release of the services.
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More Publishers to Participate in UPCC eBook Collections on Project MUSE
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Project MUSE announced that 13 more scholarly publishers signed contracts to participate in the UPCC eBook Collections, coming to the MUSE platform on Jan. 1, 2012. To date, a total of 64 university and scholarly presses have contracted to include their ebooks in the initiative. UPCC (University Press Content Consortium) collections will offer top-quality book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's full-text scholarly journals, with library-friendly access and usage terms and affordable tiered pricing.
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Elsevier Enriches Online Articles with Google Maps
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Elsevier announced that Google Maps functionality is now available in its journals. This new feature enriches online articles on SciVerse ScienceDirect with interactive maps, adapting to the needs of various scientific disciplines to visualize and to interact with the author's geographic data.
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University of Michigan Libraries Target HathiTrust’s Orphan Works
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by Barbara Quint
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Orphan works have forever been a thorn in the side of librarians, particularly academic librarians. Orphans are in-copyright works for which current copyright holders are difficult or impossible to locate or perhaps even to identify. With the multi-front move to digital books now underway, the problem of getting permission to use orphans has gone from an occasional one-campus/one-copy task to opening millions of books to broad web access. A journey of a thousand miles begins with just one step. And, the Copyright Office at the University of Michigan libraries (MLibrary) just tied the laces on its hiking boots by initiating a project to identify the orphans within the 8.7 million digital books in the HathiTrust Digital Library. An estimated 73% (6,351,000) items in the collection are in-copyright and, from that number, an initial 100,000-item sample identified 45% as orphans. So, if my calculations are correct, MLibrary staff could be looking for more than 2.85 million Little Orphan Annies.
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