In my email this morning, I received a notice from Quora that I had been invited to submit an answer for the following question: Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again? After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here: Not that I've ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should...

Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

John D. Podesta and Carl Malamud (of FedFlix) have written an open letter to President Obama calling upon him to launch an initiative to find out what it would take to scan and post the entire contents of the public-domain government archives so that more people would have access to them. Imagine if the riches contained in the National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Government Printing Office, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Technical Information Service, and scores of other federal organizations were made available, becoming the core of a national effort to...

President Obama has issued a 3-page memo directing government agencies to start using electronic record management. Digitizing records will provide better archives for future generations to study, and will also help reduce costs. Another goal is to give the general public better digital access to the workings of their government. The directive gives agencies one month to designate the official who will be in charge of the effort, and four months to come up with plans to do it. Computerworld notes that the government does not have a good track record with digitization, pointing to the failed ten-year effort...

TechCrunch has a piece on a startup called 1DollarScan, a scanning and digitizing company that is offering extremely inexpensive scanning and digitizing services. An expansion of a similar operation in Japan called Bookscan, 1DollarScan’s prices start at $1 for digitizing ten photos or 100 pages from a book. I’m not sure exactly how this service will stand legal scrutiny. Consumers might have the fair-use right to scan and digitize their own books (though some will still argue vociferously against that), but it seems to me that a company that offered this service to other people for a profit is...

From the Bodleian Library at Oxford University: A fifteen-month research project of the earliest surviving geographically recognizable map of Great Britain, known as the Gough Map, provides some revealing insights into one of the most enigmatic cartographic pieces from the Bodleian collections. The findings are recorded on a newly-launched website www.goughmap.org. The fifteen-month AHRC-funded [Arts and Humanities Research Council] project used an innovative approach that explores the map's 'linguistic geographies', that is the writing used on the map by the scribes who created it, with the aim of offering a re-interpretation of the Gough Map's origins, provenance, purpose and creation of which...

From The Wellcome Library Blog: As part of the Wellcome Digital Library pilot project, we’re joining forces with ProQuest to digitise over fifteen thousand volumes from our rare book collection. They will be made available through ProQuest’s new Early European Books (EEB) database – a sister project to the long-established and successful Early English Books Online. As its name suggests, EEB will trace the history of printing in continental Europe from its origins up to 1700. A number of other libraries have already contributed to the project, including the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. We’ll be...

You forgot to record Monday night's premiere of the new C-SPAN documentary on the Library of Congress, didn't you? Well, you can watch it online for free at C-SPAN's LOC minisite. The 90 minute film takes a holistic approach to its subject, covering everything from the library's founding to its architecture to its vast collection (including a Braille copy of "Mein Kampf"). If you just want to watch the section about how the library uses technology to preserve and study manuscripts, jump to 1:15:45 and watch the part about the Preservation Division. If you're even more impatient, jump straight to 1:20:45, which...

In his recent talk at the ALA conference last month, Eric Hellman focused on how libraries can best enable discovery, especially as increasing computational power makes it easy for patrons to perform sophisticated searches. He suggests two options: One alternative is to insist on getting the full text for everything they offer. (Unglued ebooks offer that, that's what we're working on at Gluejar.) The other alternative for libraries is to feed their bibliographic data to search engines so that library users can discover books in libraries. Outside libraries, this process is known as "Search Engine Optimization". When I said during my talk...

South Korea's Education Ministry has announced that it will convert all textbooks to digital format by 2015, reports eSchoolNews. The digital textbooks will include supplemental teaching materials and "two-way study methods," and be available across multiple platforms. (Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the tip.) (Photo: rob.wall)...

The Internet Archive reports on its blog that it is concerned about the original copies of books being digitized for libraries and other institutions being discarded or moved to "off site repositories" when they are returned.  Their solution is to take these original books and archive them for future use: A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about  the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank...

ReadWriteWeb reports that Hollywood trade magazine BoxOffice has digitized a large portion of its 91 year back issue archive, and is working on the rest. Now nearly 3000 issues of the publication are available online as free PDFs (or page images for more recent issues). Although they lack metadata or search capabilities, these digital back-issues will still be a valuable resource for scholars, historians, and others with an interest in movie history.    ...