No Shelf Required

Ebrary has added 14 new publishers to their collection.  They are: 

Ashgate Publishing
Continuum Books
CQ Press
Georgetown University Press
The University of Washington Press
The University of Alberta Press
The University Press of Kentucky
McFarland & Co.
The International Monetary Fund
Grey House Publishing
The Policy Press
Templeton Foundation Press
Smithers Rapra
Math Solutions

For more info, see the press release. 

Top 10 list in support of ebooks.  From the Writers Handbook Blog.

 10 Reasons Not to Write Off Reading From A Screen
Over the past few months there has been much discussion of an impending digital revolution in the way we read books. While much of this is hyperbole there has been incredulity in many quarters that anybody would ever want to read from a screen. We are all attached to books and the idea seems, at first glance, anachronistic. However there are some good reasons why it might not go away as quickly as you’d think.

Here’s why:

1.)    We do it all the time anyway. Whether its emails, blogs, the newspaper or text messages for the bulk of us, most of our reading is already on screen. The New York Times now was 13 million online readers per day against a print readership of 1.1 million.

2.)    Those who read books read the most online. The Guardian reported that “women and pensioners were [the] most active readers” (22/08/08). A recent study showed women, the most enthusiastic readers, dominate social networks; 16% of “silver surfers” spend over 42 hours per week online. Moreover overall internet usage was up 158% in the UK from 2002-2007.

3.)    e-Ink technology removes many of the disadvantages of screens. Using ionized black and white particles it eliminates eye strain and glare, expertly recreating the look and feel of paper and print.

4.)    New devices (using e-Ink) like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle are backed by technology giants who know how to make a product work. They come with features like an MP3 player (the Sony) and wireless connectivity (the Kindle). Expect them to only improve in the coming years.

5.)    In Japan mobile phone fiction- keitai novels- have gone from being a niche market to big business, with some novels being downloaded over 200k times a day. It has been reported that half of bestsellers in Japan are now mobile.

6.)    Likewise in China online novels are huge. The most searched for term on Chinese search engine baidu.cn is “novel”. According to Wired 10m “youth” now list reading online as one of their main hobbies.

7.)    The iPhone has changed the parameters again by offering a fantastic reading experience, on a portable easy to use, multi-functioning device. Apps like eReader and Stanza make an already desirable phone a viable ebook reader.

8.)    Paper costs are going through the roof- up 150% this year. With no slowing of the commodity book in site paper and manufacturing costs are likely to increase. Along with the cheapness of delivery the economics of electronic reading start to make sense.

9.)    Government policy is to invest in ereading. Education policy wonks view reading from laptops and PDAs as a handy workaround to encourage book averse but technophile teenagers to read. A school in Birmingham even replaced all textbooks with Palm Pilots.

10.)  The internet offers a whole new way of consuming content. Bundling, chunking, web only content, integrated multimedia elements, exciting new serialisations are only the beginning. This is reading from a screen not as something like lost but as something gained.
No one is saying that we will all run off any read all our books off a screen. Books are here to stay. Reading from one type of screen or another is not about to replace books, rather it is an addition to the varied climate to literature that already exists, a creative challenge, a commercial opportunity and new way for readers to enjoy texts.

Michael Bhaskar is Digital Publishing Executive at Pan Macmillan and blogs at http://thedigitalist.net.

What a fabulous innovation from McGill University.  They purchased a Kirtas APT BookScan 2400RA  and will be digitizing rare materials from their collection to sell via print-on-demand.  It’s fabulous to see a library embarking on a project like this, one that will bring income!  Wow, the envy I have…..

For the full story see the press release.

Aug. 19, 2008 | ScienceDaily

Computer Users Are Digitizing Books Quickly And Accurately With New Method

Millions of computer users collectively transcribe the equivalent of 160 books each day with better than 99 percent accuracy, despite the fact that few spend more than a few seconds on the task and that most do not realize they are doing valuable work, Carnegie Mellon University researchers reported recently in Science Express.

They can work so prodigiously because Carnegie Mellon computer scientists led by Luis von Ahn have taken a widely used Web site security measure, called a CAPTCHA, and given it a second purpose — digitizing books produced prior to the computer age. When Web visitors solve one of the distorted-letter puzzles so they can register for email or post a comment on a blog, they simultaneously help turn the printed word into machine-readable text.

More than a year after implementing their version, called reCAPTCHA, http://recaptcha.net/ on thousands of Web sites worldwide, the researchers conclude that their word deciphering process achieves the industry standard for human transcription services — better than 99 percent accuracy. Their report, published online today, will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Science.

Furthermore, the amount of work that can be accomplished is herculean. More than 100 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day and, though each puzzle takes only a few seconds to solve, the aggregate amount of time translates into hundreds of thousands of hours of human effort that can potentially be tapped. During the reCAPTCHA system’s first year of operation, more than 1.2 billion reCAPTCHAs have been solved and more than 440 million words have been deciphered. That’s the equivalent of manually transcribing more than 17,600 books.

“More Web sites are adopting reCAPTCHAs each day, so the rate of transcription keeps growing,” said von Ahn, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science’s Computer Science Department. “More than 4 million words are being transcribed every day. It would take more than 1,500 people working 40 hours a week at a rate of 60 words a minute to match our weekly output.”

Von Ahn said reCAPTCHAs are being used to digitize books for the Internet Archive and to digitize newspapers for The New York Times. Digitization allows older works to be indexed, searched, reformatted and stored in the same way as today’s online texts.

Old texts are typically digitized by photographically scanning pages and then transforming the text using optical character recognition (OCR) software. But when ink has faded and paper has yellowed, OCR sometimes can’t recognize some words — as many as one out of every five, according to the Carnegie Mellon team’s tests. Without reCAPTCHA, these words must be deciphered manually at great expense.

Conventional CAPTCHAs, which were developed at Carnegie Mellon, involve letters and numbers whose shapes have been distorted or backgrounds altered so that computers can’t recognize them, but humans can. To create reCAPTCHAs, the researchers use images of words from old texts that OCR systems have had trouble reading.

Helping to make old books and newspapers more accessible to a computerized world is something that the researchers find rewarding, but is only part of a larger goal. “We are demonstrating that we can take human effort — human processing power — that would otherwise be wasted and redirect it to accomplish tasks that computers cannot yet solve,” von Ahn said.

For instance, he and his students have developed online games, available at http://www.gwap.com, that analyze photos and audio recordings — tasks beyond the capability of computers. Similarly, University of Washington biologists recently built Fold It, http://fold.it/, a game in which people compete to determine the ideal structure of a given protein.

In addition to von Ahn, authors of the new report include computer science undergraduate Benjamin Maurer, graduate students Colin McMillen and David Abraham, and Manuel Blum, professor of computer science.

Adapted from materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University.
 

Hongkiat.com offers the 20 best websites to download free ebooks.  Here is the list.  List is heavy on computer/tech sites.  Gutenberg appears to have made the runner up list- which includes an additional 15 sites, so let’s make it the 35 best websites for free Ebooks.

While visiting Michael Ross of Britannica last week, he mentioned a new partnership with Ingram Digital.  Ingram’s Myilibrary will now distribute 27 Britannica ebook titles.  For more information, see the press release. 

August 11th News from ebrary

ebrary now the first ebook company to become Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks certified.  Press Release with more information here.

Monday, August 11th I stopped by the Encyclopaedia Britannica offices on LaSalle street in Chicago.  I visited Michael Ross, Senior VP of Corporate Development.  Michael gave me a nice tour of the Britannica headquarters and I took some photos to share with everyone.  You’ll see some remarkable similarities between an international publisher and a library.

They have bookshelves AND servers.

  60+ servers in 3 locations as a matter of fact.

  No, this isn’t spaghetti, it’s Britannica ONLINE!!  Don’t cut the pink one….

  Despite the thousands of wires to support Britannica online, they still have a print library collection.

  And they use white boards to sketch out future plans.

  I even got a sneak peek at the cover art for the 2009 Almanac!

 And they dress business casual, just like me! 

Seriously now, Britannica has a really cool feature coming to all of their online products sometime this fall.  Right now it is called “project darwin” but it will take on a new name online.  This new feature will bring web 2.0 features to Britannica online including user comment/feedback areas.    Some other facts about Britannica:

Over one million visitors use Britannica online every day.

Britannica offers multiple interfaces for their products (they manage over 30) - public (free, with annoy wear) , individual membership, institutional/libraries, and multiple foreign language interfaces including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, and 2 in Spanish.

They offer thousands of videos too.

Britannica Blog offers daily posts on thousands of topics, by hundreds of writers - many well known. 

For more information, check out Britannica Online here:  www.britannica.com

 And thanks, Michael, for the tour!

We asked and you responded.  What traditional print  reference source would you like to have electronically?  Vote for your favourite among the choices in our current poll.  Do you have a favourite print reference source you wish you could use online?  Add it to our growing list.  Comment on this post.

From Marketing VOX  July 28, 2008

Digital Meets Print on Esquire’s Cover
 
The 75th anniversary October issue of Esquire will feature an electronic cover with flashing words and images. The cover, created with electronic paper display (EPD) technology, will scroll “The 21st Century Begins Now” when it hits newsstands in September, reports MediaBuyerPlanner.

To offset the cost of its digital-meets-print edition, Esquire sold the inside cover ad to Ford, which will also use the EPD technology, according to Folio. Nothing was revealed on how Ford would incorporate the technology into its creative, though the company did say that it will feature its Ford Flex in the double-page spread.

To create the cover, Esquire worked with E Ink, the electronic paper display technologies firm that developed the technology for Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony reader. Hearst, which owns a stake in E Ink, says this is the first time an electronic cover has been done. “The 21st century begins this fall. The entire issue is devoted to exploring the ideas, people and issues that will be the foundation of the 21st century,” editor-in-chief David Granger stated.

Development of the EPD cover began two years ago. Hearst wouldn’t divulge the final price tag for creating a scrolling cover, but Granger said the company hopes to find a way to bring costs to do it again. He believes EPD technology could revolutionize the way magazines are read.