Earlier today we linked Amazon’s press release stating that its Kindle e-books were available in 11,000 libraries nationwide. In some respects Amazon may have jumped the gun a little, as I found when I went looking for these books via my own local library (which lends out Overdrive e-books). I didn’t find anything for the Kindle, so I used the contact form to email an inquiry about it. A librarian replied that “our [Overdrive] representative has told us that we can expect Kindle books within the next week,” and linked me to Overdrive’s own press release on the matter....

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...

Last Saturday, Sue Polanka of No Shelf Required sat down with Rick Lumsden, Britannica's Executive Director for Institutional Sales and Marketing, to find out a little more about the publisher's new ebook platform. The interview is only eight minutes long, but here are some of the key points if you don't have an opportunity to listen: * Ebook platform launch coincides with new Britannica Education Publishing project, which is in partnership with Rosen Publishing and consists of hundreds of nonfiction titles. * Platform offers standard user interactivity features like notes, highlighting. * Britannica's own platform is browser-based, but will offer downloading to external...

Publishing Perspectives reports some interesting results on a poll it posted as to whether libraries should loan e-books. 81% of poll-takers said that libraries should loan e-books, and a further 12% said they should loan them with a fee. Only 28% said they had actually checked a library e-book out. (A further 47% said they planned to, but people plan to do a lot of things they never actually get around to doing.) Only 118 people replied to the poll, so the sample is not very large—and it was of Publishing Perspectives’s readers, meaning that it is a bit...

Content developer My Legacy Press and publisher Apple of the Eye are developing an “accurate graphic novel-version of the Bible”, called The Almighty Bible, as a paper graphic novel and as an iPhone/iPad app. This is, of course, far from the first graphic novel adaptation of the Bible, but one thing that makes this one stand out is the iOS adaptation. The first volume, “Genesis: A Graphic Novel”, is due out in mid-September. One of the stated goals of the project is to bring the Bible to kids and teens who spend a lot of time using their electronic...

From the press release: ebrary®, a leading provider of digital content products and technologies, today announced that its flagship subscription e-book database, Academic Complete™, now exceeds 50,000 titles from the world’s leading publishers. Academic Complete continues to be the largest multidisciplinary e-book database licensed to libraries throughout the world, under a simultaneous, multi-user access model with continual growth. Furthermore, ebrary’s Academic Complete, Government Complete™, Public Library Complete™, and College Complete™ are the only e-book products that enables libraries to upload and integrate their own digital materials such as theses and dissertations, yearbooks, and newspapers with DASH!™ (Data Sharing, Fast). ...

For secret agent fans of all types, the last few weeks of official government exchanges between Russia and the United States has been a treat!  In light of this breaking news as well as a personal interest in spying and national intrigue, I thought it might be interesting to see what sort of information is available for ereaders like ourselves. What I’ve found is truly amazing, with downloadable resources from the CIA, FBI, OSS and many others. Besides just the stories, I thought this would be a great chance to use my Android phone as well as the iPad, to see...

According to No Shelf Required ebrary announced the availability of two new ebook collections, one for business and the other for aerospace. The Business Complete collection offers about 1600 business eBook titles ranging in topics from leadership to accounting and HR to sales and marketing. The Aerospace collection (number of titles not mentioned in PR) contains such topics as aerodynamics and aeronautics, turbulence, fluid dynamics, shipbuilding, and vibration....

From Resource Shelf: The new Public Library Complete (PLC) subscription service from ebrary includes more than 20,000 ebooks from leading publishers with more ebooks coming into the package every day-at no additional cost to subscribing libraries. In March, ebrary launched a School Collection of more than 6,600 ebooks plus more than 4,200 Spanish language ebooks from ebrary partner, e-Libro, available separately (e-Libro Secundaria) or as a subset. That School Collection is now itself a subset of the new PLC and public libraries subscribing to PLC can share access to local public high schools at no additional charge. The DASH! (DAta SHaring,...