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.    ...

Doctor Who has been much on my mind lately, what with the new Matt Smith season starting up. (Next Saturday’s episode will be the one penned by master horror/fantasy wordsmith Neil Gaiman, and I’m quite looking forward to it.) But as I was discussing earlier episodes with a friend who is watching through them for the first time, I realized one of them touched on a TeleRead-related topic, and I didn’t mention it when it was originally on the air. The episode in question is the season 4 two-parter “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead”, written by now-showrunner...

A pair of interesting articles about Google Books came to my attention over the last day or so. First, in The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal looks at how Google has been tweaking and updating its search algorithms to trawl the linkless world of text on paper, where searchers have radically different needs than those who search the web. In the last couple of days, Google has rolled out a new tweak called “Rich Results,” which presents one extra-large search result if Google thinks that you’re searching for a specific book title. Rich Results is the...

A couple of weeks back, BookBrunch featured an article looking at a new way of tackling the problem of finding the owners of orphan works—books that are still under copyright but whose current owners are unknown. It is estimated that up to 40% of library holdings may be orphaned. Google’s solution for Google Books was simply to proceed with scanning anyway and let the rightsholders come after them. But ARROW, a project of the European Commission’s eContentplus program, is trying to make large-scale orphan rights searches feasible and productive. But if this process of...

Thanks to BookofJoe for the link. You can find them here....

For the aviation enthusiast and avid eBook reader, the fusion of these two resources together can be found at the Flightglobal Archives.  Located at http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/index.html, this online PDF archive of the many years of back issues and additional resources is easy to search, easy to use and in many cases, downloadable to your reading device of choice. With large page sizes and graphical images, aviation history, at least from my past usage, is not commonly associated with easy reading on any electronic device.  However, Flightglobal has a done an excellent job with the archives in bringing these back issues and other resources...

In a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched the repeated claims by the content industry that some new copyright violation is going to “kill” their business, a study on the economic impact of Google Book Search shows that having a searchable catalog of books has apparently helped publishers a lot more than it has hurt. Mike Masnick at Techdirt posts a summary of the study, which shows that affected publishers’ profits grew faster on average in the years after the project than the years before. Publishers who did not opt out of the publishing partner agreement also...

The Bookseller reports on author Jeanette Winterson expressing dismay over the march of digitization (or “digitisation” as they spell it on that side of the Atlantic). At an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, she said: "What worries me is that a load of s**** has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that the Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves." She brings up the browser’s dilemma: if you can...

From the Article: Leading educational institutes and libraries are making books immortal – virtually. Rare books and publications are now in the focus of many local and national-level projects of digitization. On academic front, projects like INFLIBNET, acronym for Information and Library Network Centre, hold great promise, believe experts. Dr Jagdish Arora, director of the project, told TOI that despite some glitches, the project was very much in shape. “Apart from providing over 70,000 books and 2,000 journals online, we have started a project called National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for scholarly content (N-LIST) from...

We’ve mentioned ReCAPTCHA a time or two—the security effort by Carnegie Mellon researchers that took two problems and made them solve each other: how to make a “CAPTCHA” (an automated Turing test meant to prove that a human wants to access the website rather than a spambot) that couldn’t be solved by a computer optical character recognizer, and how to digitize words in old documents that a computer’s OCR couldn’t puzzle out. By feeding these unrecognizable words to web users, paired with words the computer knew already, it both tested whether they were real people and told...

Gizmodo has a piece on the BookLiberator, a cube of plexiglass that contains two opposite-facing video cameras to photograph facing pages of a book. You place it on a book, photograph, lift, turn page, place it, etc. Conceptually, this appears similar to the $300 DIY Book Scanner I covered in December—they both use two cameras to snap two facing pages at a time. The BookLiberator looks a little more tedious, comparing the two: with the DIY scanner, you just tilt up a hinged half-cube to turn the page, but with the BookLiberator you have to lift the entire...

The Bookseller reports that Bloomsbury is going to digitize and e-publish the million-page personal archive of World War II prime minister Sir Winston Churchill. The archive reportedly includes “drafts and notes for his speeches, and key correspondence and papers." The article does not mention whether this archive includes any books, either public-domain or still under copyright. It’s hard to imagine any single person’s archive being a million pages in size without them—but then, it’s hard to imagine it even with them. If any are included, I wonder what copyright issues Bloomsbury would have to clear? The archive...