The World eBook Fair begins this Saturday, July 4th, coinciding with Project Gutenberg’s 39th anniversary.

To celebrate, the World eBook Fair members are providing free access to over two million books between July 4th and August 4th.

found via ResourceShelf

A Fire on the Plain is a post by Peter Brantley of the University of California that relates the essence of conversations he has had with several rightsholders who were part of the Google Book Search negotiations.  An exerpt:

From the rightsholders’ perspective, one terminal per library, instead of being stingy, quivered with profligacy. I heard remarked by several individuals (and often enough now to feel it corroborated) that indeed this concession started out far more restricted: either no public access, or starkly limited access – perhaps apocryphally, a single terminal in each State capitol, or one terminal in each city. In short, it was impressed upon me that libraries were lucky to get as much as they did.

As I understand it, rightsholders feared that having unhindered access to books online at libraries might (among other issues) encourage libraries to decelerate buying print books, thereby reducing royalties to authors and profits to publishers. In this equation, more public access = less revenue.

This is not a good sign.  If this is applicable to rightsholders as a group (and be mindful that this is an incredibly small sample of opinion), then the resistance of publishers and other rightsholders is going to increase exponentially when we finally get an e-book reader that becomes the equivalent of what the I-Pod was to e-audio.  Libraries and other organizations need to ensure that Fair Use is respected (and utilized), and that there is a broad understanding of the changes happening to media and culture.

found via Open Access News

I have encountered a few interesting items relating to online, full-text books during the past few days, and thought they would make a good snapshot of where things stand at this time:

• Google Book Search : the Good, the Bad & the Ugly is an article in the current issue of Campus Technology which gives a great, non-technical overview of what the project is doing, and where it might be going. (found via LISNews )
• Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale (Pdf) is the text of Luc Vincent’s keynote at the ICDAR 2007 conference. Don’t read it simply because he heads Googles Optical Character Recognition (OCR) team – read it because it is fascinating and informative! (posted to NGC4lib by Owen Stephens)
• Finally, there is The Top Inventions of 2008 by Michael Hart (inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg). This isn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill predictions article. This looks at technology that is just around the corner (USB 3.0, Flash memory capacity, and the number of OCR scanned books) and realizes that we will soon be able to carry around more full-text books on a USB flash drive than exist in most libraries. Think about how that possibility will change our profession. (found via Open Access News )

The World E-Book Library is holding an E-Book Fair starting on July 4th, 2007. In the two fairs it held in 2006, it made all of the content in the e-book library available for free for a one-month period. Mark your calendars….

from ResourceShelf