E-books are good for more than just reading. Turns out they can be great for research, too. One antique auto enthusiast used the wide variety of period books and magazines available on Google Books to help him add some period décor to the 1906 Oldsmobile Model B Runabout he was scratch-building. When Bob started building his car, he started off with a set of plans he obtained from another replica car-builder, but he also wanted to add as many original qualities to the car as possible that were not in the plans, such as a steamer...

From Campus Technology: The publishing arm of the University of Cambridge will be working with an education software producer to convert three of its medical textbooks into iOS apps for use on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. GetYa Learn On(GYLO) is tackling the conversion for Cambridge University Press. The project will first cover three of Cambridge's key texts on radiology, neuropharmacology, and anesthesia. Expected for release in the iTunes Store in June 2011, the first app will be a portable version of the radiology text Final FRCR Long Cases, which users will be able to personalize by adding notes, highlights, and bookmarks. The text...

Received the following email from Marie Lebert in Paris.  For those of you who can read French: Here are some news for your bilingual (English-French) readers inTeleRead, if relevant.Thank you,Marie,writing from Paris, the City of Lights---We began publishing a collection of 50+ articles to celebrate the 40thanniversary of the ebook (on 4 July 2011), under the title "L'ebook a40 ans" (The ebook is 40 years old).The daily articles detail milestones from 1971 to 2011, per chronological order.Here are the first articles (in French):L'ebook a 40 ans > 1971 > Le Projet Gutenberg, un projet visionnairehttp://www.actualitte.com/dossiers/1448-anniversaire-ebook-projet-gutenberg-visionnaire.htmL'ebook a 40 ans > 1974 >...

Now this is where the real power of ebooks and POD starts to show itself. From The Bookseller: Bloomsbury will bring 500 out of print titles by the likes of Alan Clark, Edith Sitwell and Bernice Rubens back into the market as digital editions this autumn with the launch of a new imprint. Bloomsbury Reader, which will be run by digital media director Stephanie Duncan, is similar to Ed Victor's Bedford Square Books,which he announced earlier this month. Bloomsbury Reader will publish books currently unavailable in print where all English language rights have reverted to the author or their estate and there is...

To give you some feel for Book Expo America, here are a few photos: Dominique Raccah doing some business at the Sourcebooks booth: Hundreds of different galleys are given out by publishers during the show.  People wander around with shopping bags full of them.  Nicole Brinkley kindly let me photograph her suitcase.  She runs the Word for Teens blog.  Check it out at wordforteens.com One of the two OverDrive booths: If you want proof that the current publishing model makes no sense just look at part of the Remainder section. Sales here are wholesale - for bookstores who want cheap inventory.   Huge lines in a...

Publishers are trying to make e-books act more like print books—but some future library concepts are making print books act more like e-books. In particular, the $81 million Joe and Rika Mansueto Library that has just opened at the University of Chicago. SingularityHub’s Peter Murray has a feature on this fascinating library that stores 3.5 million books and journal volumes in a five-story-tall system of bins that only needs one-seventh as much space to house the books as a normal library. The bins are organized by book size, not by category or other classification, and books are retrieved...

“If you two don’t stop quarreling back there, I’m going to turn this e-book industry around!” One might imagine Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s mother scolding them thus from the front seat of the family car, as over the last day or so the two have been issuing dueling announcements over the length of their battery life. Thus far Amazon has claimed the Kindle to have a battery life of up to one month if reading one hour per day with the wi-fi turned off. (30 days x 1 hour = 30 hours.) When Barnes & Noble came...

Jason Boog of GalleyCat has taken a look at an essay by agent Andrew Wylie coming out in the new issue of WSJ Magazine. Wylie, Boog reports, is concerned about the quality issue in publishing, noting that even with all the self-publishing options available, editors and other quality controllers are an essential part of the process. Here’s an excerpt: “The devaluation of quality editing and writing is sad and it’s inevitable. Each house has a large number of titles to publish, and with a difficult economy, fewer people to handle the publications. But publishers need to...

Published in Good EReader, this interview discusses the new Nook and Kobo's new unit. ...

Check out this article by Mercy Pilkington at Good eReader. In addition here's an interview she did with Google: ...

From the press release: Ectaco Inc., the world's leader in portable language learning and the manufacturer of the jetBook eBook Reader announced today that it has teamed up with Hanvon, a leading global eBook Reader manufacturer and character recognition technology provider to create the first ever eBook Reader oriented towards education and implementation into standard classroom usage for teachers and students worldwide. These two brand new Educational eBook Readers will be showcased at the 2011 Book Expo of America in New York. The first educational device is the jetBook K-12 for the US market features one-of-a-kind interactive technology to aid students in honing...

Here’s a report that begins with talk about Google opening an eBook service and then moves into a report that Google is “walking away  “from eBookstore they opened about six months ago? That’s the world of Google for you. Book Expo America is going on this week in NYC and this morning a panel about Google books took place at the conference. As Laura Hazard Owen reports on paidContent Scott Dougall, Google Books Director of Product Management hinted but did NOT confirm that an eBook rental service using a “Netflix-like service is in the works.” Owen goes on to tell us that although...