From the press release: Baker & Taylor, the world's largest distributor of physical and digital books, and Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest bookseller, announced at the American Library Association Annual Conference that the companies will partner to build awareness among NOOK customers that digital books are available for loan from local libraries, and to provide all library patrons with a seamless method for borrowing eBooks and other digital content. The highly acclaimed, bestselling line of NOOK ereaders will be featured devices on Axis 360, Baker & Taylor's revolutionary digital media circulation and management platform. ... Starting this fall, patrons...

Haynes Publishing, who does the repair manuals we all know, is creating e-versions and presenting them to retailers across the US.  They hope to go worldwide once they refine their product.  According to The Bookseller, they plan to convert their top 50 manuals and make them available by subscription by autumn 2011.  They will not be dropping their printed line. Haynes Group c.e.o. Eric Oakley said: "With this new product we have been able to incorporate a great deal of material that it is not possible to provide in a printed product. The electronic product includes all of the information in...

Wired has an extensive report on J.K. Rowling’s rumor-surrounded “Pottermore” website, which is due to launch in October (just in time for Halloween). The big part of the story of interest to TeleRead readers is that Pottermore will be the exclusive outlet for the Harry Potter e-books, and the e-books will be DRM-free (albeit digitally watermarked with the identity of the purchaser), meaning (as least as far as Wired claims) that they will not be locked into any one device or platform. The first e-book will be available at launch, in multiple languages, with others to follow in...

Notes and comments scribbled by Charles Darwin on the pages and margins of his own personal library have been made available online for the first time. Darwin’s personal scientific library, the majority of which is held at Cambridge University Library, has been digitised in a collaborative effort involving Cambridge, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The digitisation project was jointly sponsored by JISC and National Endowment for the Humanities through a transatlantic digitization collaboration grant. In total, Darwin’s library amounted to 1480 books, of which 730 contain abundant research...

From the press release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced new series for three Gale Digital Collections – Slavery and Anti-Slavery, The Making of the Modern World and The Making of Modern Law.   “We are excited to publish additional installments of these important collections,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “With these new releases, Gale continues to fulfill its mission to create essential resources for scholars and students in fields of high interest.”   Draper added: “Most of the materials in these new installments have never been digitized before...

From a News Release: The Internet Archive, the leading non-profit repository of digital media assets, announced today that it has adopted Kaltura’s Video solution to enable its entire digital video library to seamlessly support both HTML5 and Flash in order to provide viewers an optimal online video experience across all browsers and on any portable device. Kaltura’s video player automatically identifies whether the device and browser require a Flash or HTML5 player, and delivers the content accordingly. This deployment follows a related project undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation to power video in Wikipedia using the same Kaltura open source tools. An...

The Chronicle of Higher Education article re-explores the Georgia State University lawsuit against a group of academic publishers, which they describe as "part of a much bigger struggle over how scholarly communication will evolve in a digital world." There's been a lot of talk about—and some action on—promoting library-publisher collaborations. But the struggle persists. It's taking place in many theaters of operation across academe: in negotiations over licensing agreements that control access to scholarly content; in the rise of library-based and grass-roots scholarly publishing that might compete with what traditional publishers offer; in the spreading open-access movement. Don't expect a peace...

A KINDLE CALENDAR WITH RECURRING EVENTSFor now, Amazon Kindle apps like this are U.S. only, still, although they have said on the forums that they intend them to be international at some point.7 Dragons has done it again.  There are several Kindle calendar apps now but no other with Recurring Events (apparently quite difficult to do) or some of the other features included. From the product description: (All emphases mine)"Calendar is a user friendly scheduling tool and daily planner for Kindle.Calendar lets you see events and to-do lists quickly and easily with day, month and week views.  It lets you create...

Ironic amusement fills me when I hear book industry people say things like "metadata has become cool", or "context is everything". Welcome to the 20th century and all that. Meanwhile, in the library industry, metadata has been cool long enough to coat everything with a thick rind of freezer burn.There's good news and notsogood news for ebook metadata. The revision to the EPUB standard, published just a month ago, includes metadata tools that could eventually lead to a new era of metadata cooperation between publishers and the entire book supply chain, including libraries. At the same time, the revision fails to...

From Publishers Weekly: Bantam’s Loveswept imprint was one of the most popular romance imprints in the 1980s and 1990s and now Random House is reviving Loveswept as an e-book only line that will release its first titles in August. The new imprint will be a collaboration between Random U.S. and Random House Group’s Transworld Publishers division which will let the company release e-books simultaneously in North America, the U.K., and the British Commonwealth. In the U.S., each title will include bonus content, and previously released titles will be reintroduced with new packaging. Random is promising an “aggressive marketing campaign” the will feature...

The Bookseller has confirmed this in a special newsflash email this morning.  The details were announced in a press conference today.  The ebooks will be released in October and be available only on the Pottermore website and will be in a variety of formats, including that for the Kindle. According to a further report in The Bookseller: J K Rowling has confirmed that she will release paid-for e-book versions of her incredibly successful Harry Potter books from her new website Pottermore "in partnership with J K Rowling’s publishers worldwide". The news was unveiled via YouTube and at a press conference held today...

From the O'Reilly site: Presented by: Mark Coker, Chad Jennings, Pete Nikolai, Bob Young Duration: Approximately 60 minutes. Cost: Free The lines between traditional and self-publishing is blurring. In fact, some traditional publishers are launching their own self-publishing imprints. We've lined up four leaders of the self-publishing world to share lessons learned and how we can all work together. The webcast features insights from Eileen Gittins (CEO of Blurb), Bob Young (CEO of Lulu), Mark Coker (Smashwords Founder) and Pete Nikolai (Director at Westbow Press, the self-publishing imprint of Thomas Nelson). You can register here....