Andrew Richard Albanese from Publisher’s Weekly wrote a very nice article about life with eBooks in public libraries.  I have clipped a couple of paragraphs below.  The fulltext is available on the Publisher’s Weekly site. Begin clip: Discussions between libraries and the big six publishers over e-book lending have grabbed headlines in 2012, but despite [...]

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From an Unglue.it press release, very disappointing news. I have no doubt that Eric and his team will find an alternative solution very soon. “Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns.” announced Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar, Inc., the [...]

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Smashwords today announced Library Direct, a new service that allows libraries and library networks to acquire and establish large opening collections of ebooks, direct from Smashwords. Library Direct is available to libraries that host and manage their own ebook checkout systems, typically using Adobe Content Server, and that are capable of acquiring a large opening [...]

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IPSWICH, Mass. — August 2, 2012 —Librarians accustomed to selecting and managing their eBook collections through GOBI3 from YBP Library Services (YBP), the academic division of Baker & Taylor, now have additional access options for the more than 320,000 eBook titles from eBooks on EBSCOhost®. EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and YBP have expanded the EBSCO eBook [...]

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Here is some information on the SEFLIN virtual conference on eBooks, September 21st. Join us for an exciting one-day online conference as five nationally- and internationally-known speakers discuss wide-ranging aspects of the growing impact of eBooks on libraries. Brought to you by the Southeast Florida Library Information Network (SEFLIN). eBooks: Benefits, Challenges, and the Future [...]

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Springer, in collaboration with PCG (Publishers Communication Group) released a white paper, Scholarly eBooks: Understanding the Return on Investment for Libraries, today.  It is available for a free download from the Springer site. The following is the introduction:  The Return on Investment (RoI) of scholarly eBooks in research and academic libraries can be difficult to [...]

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Congrats to Project Gutenberg on adding it’s 40,000th title.  Hat tip to @paulkbiba for the news. From the PG site: With little fanfare, Project Gutenberg reached #40000 in its eBook series; Extinct Birds: an attempt to unite in one volume a short account of those birds which have become extinct in historical times: that is, [...]

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On Saturday, June 23, 2012 at the ALA conference, several hundred librarians gathered for an interesting discussion on eBook collection development practices.  This ALA Program was a panel discussion featuing eBook collection development practices from both academic and public libraries.  It was organized by Serin Anderson and Christopher Platt. Heather McCormack from Library Journal moderated [...]

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Congrats to everyone at Unglue.it for the first successful campaign.  Here is the official press release: Two hundred and fifty-nine supporters pledged a total of $7,578 to a campaign to “unglue” Ruth Finnegan’s 1970 classic, “Oral Literature in Africa”. The campaign, which lasted 33 days, topped the campaign’s target at 12:30AM EDT on June 20 [...]

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It’s interesting to see more academic libraries using funds to subsidize author fees for open access journals. I expect this trend to continue.  Below is another example between SAGE and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, from the press release: Los Angeles, CA (June 20, 2012) SAGE and the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNC [...]

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