Even Kahle himself realizes he probably will not actually reach that goal. Google Books estimates that 130 million books exist, and Kahle is aiming at a more conservative ten million, equivalent to a university library—he would like to collect every book ever written, but realizes he likely will not get there. But he has received 500,000 books so far, which are being indexed and carefully stored.

But these books are not being collected electronically the way Kahle’s other archives have been—they will be physically stored in a climate-controlled warehouse. He’s concerned about keeping the books safe against a future when they might possibly be needed.

The idea does make me chuckle, a little—not because of anything wrong with it; the preservation of knowledge is always a laudable goal. But it brings to my gamer and SF fan’s mind the idea of a post-holocaust game or movie setting in which Brewster Kahle’s warehouse is one of the sole remaining repositories of human knowledge.

Regardless, best of luck to Brewster Kahle in his efforts. As the son of two librarians, I have to respect someone who wants to make sure books are well-preserved.

EBookNewser points out that there don’t seem to be any events scheduled during the fair to increase visibility, which seems too bad. At any rate it runs until August 4th.

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 such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seen as an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing. Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future.

So what does a library do?  Remember, the choices they make will ultimtely affect you, the eBook buyer, reader and enthusiast!

Ultimately, I think libraries should focus for now on the free repositories available for use.  Given the advances in Google Books, Hathi Trust, the Open Library and others, this course of action will help them stabilize their budgets, offer more choices to their patrons (YOU!) and not  be locked into a vendor’s approach to the eBook world.

Is that realistic?  In some cases yes, in others no….here’s why.  The massive repositories now online or going online are promising to multiply a library’s local collection by 10, 20, even a 100 times more than what they could get from a vendor–all in a multiplicity of formats.  Almost any subject under the sun is now available for library patrons.

Looking for classic American and English literature?  Check–got that here.  How about common non-fiction subjects such as gardening, pirates, and even science fairs?  Yep-all of those are available!  These sample subjects are just the tip of the iceberg as to what is out available.

However, this free approach can be unrealistic if the patron demand is for the best sellers, the hot new fiction that only the vendor can offer.  Would this demand be better served by a real paper version?  There’s really no right or wrong at this point, as libraries alone know what their patrons really want.

I guess the upshot here is that given the uncertainties of the current eBook situation, I feel it would be better for libraries to minimize their eBook purchasing until some sort of standard can be worked out–but still use the (sometimes, often) free resources to enhance and stabilize their local collections.

This way, eBook enthusiasts like you and me can still find lots of goodies for our ebook readers.  Colllection integration of various free resources seems to be a better approach than a one shot only approach from any particular vendor.  Given the public API’s and integration with library standards such as OCLC and others, this doesn’t seem to be too arduous to implement.

So what do you think?  Realistic or just “pie-in-the sky”?  My thoughts?  I think it’s workable, but secretly, I’m holding out for the Digital Public Library myself!

“The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters,” Ismail writes. He notes that the library will be closed to the public for the next few days, until the lawlessness subsides.

Hypatia would be proud.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is one of several sites around the world that hosts a complete copy of the Internet Archive. (Though I expect it’s currently a little out of date, given Egypt’s current disconnection from the Internet.)

(Found via GalleyCat.)

The panel focused on the opportunities and challenges e-books offered libraries. Kahle in particular was outspoken about the need to prevent an oligarchy of a few powerful corporations from taking control of digital media for the future.

[Kahle] expressed his longstanding concern over Google’s efforts to scan collections “and sell it back to us,” and urged libraries not to give up their traditional roles. “What libraries do is buy stuff, and lend it out,” he said, suggesting that libraries “digitize what we have to, and buy what we can,” but not to let the promise of licensed access turn libraries into agents for a few major corporations. “We do so at our peril.” He also urged more dialogue with publishers and vendors about the future of digital content and the role of libraries—but he also urged bold action.

He also touched on the Open Library partnership with the Boston Public Library, involving scanning and lending in-copyright books, claiming there has been “nary a peep” from publishers wary of infringement, nor has the Internet Archive come in for legal trouble over its practice of copying and preserving web sites. He suggested it was because copyright owners recognized the non-profit, culturally-important nature of these projects. “We’re just doing what libraries do.”

Sometimes we forget that the e-book revolution is as challenging to libraries as to publishers—possibly more so. Certainly the rise of the e-book is going to bring a lot of changes to these cultural institutions. But as an earlier story today also noted, librarians are putting a lot of thought into how to adapt to these changes.

(Found via archive.org, which also has video and HD video of the panel discussion available.)

From the Internet Archive Blog:

On December 17, 2010 Brewster Kahle received the Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award for successfully challenging a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the FBI that requested personal information about a user of  Internet Archive’s site, archive.org.

You can see the award presentation and hear Brewster recount the entire ordeal.

A number of articles were written about it at the time including:

FBI Backs Off From Secret Order for Data After Lawsuit

Brewster Kahle offers a cookbook for fighting security letters

From the articles:
“What we wanted to do out of this was to leave a very public cookbook for how to push back. That was our goal in our negotiations with the FBI. We would not have settled without being able to talk about what the letters look like, how to push back and who to call. -Brewster Kahle”

Zoia Horn presented the award and spoke of her own ordeal as the first librarian to be jailed for refusing to divulge information that violated her belief in intellectual freedom during the 1972 conspiracy trial of the “Harrisburg Seven” anti-war activists.

You can also see photos of the lunch event at Internet Archive prior to the presentation in the great hall.



Yesterday, the Internet Archive and more specifically, the Open Library, posted a few photos of a new reading desk (aka Reading Desk 2.0) that includes the IA BookReader. Included in the set of photos is a pictire of IA Founder, Brewster Kahle, using the IA BookReader at Reading Desk 2.0.

For those of you who want the tech specs of what you’re seeing in the photos:

Hardware: HP L2105tm multitouch monitor, connected to laptops running Windows 7 with the HP touchscreen drivers.

Software: The Internet Archive BookReader (with mang’s new multitouch support code) running in Firefox 4 beta 6 for multitouch support.

The BookReader code is open source and available at:http://github.com/openlibrary/bookreader. More here including how to use it with books available via the Open Library.

Today, at the Books in Browsers Conference underway at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, Michael Ang gave a presentation about the new multitouch support code he developed for the BookReader.

Several pages of pics of the IA BookReader (and other tools) using Ang’s new software are available here. Want to look at the material in other formats? No problem.

Congrats to Michael Ang and the IA.

Source: OpenLibrary (via Twitter)

Matt Bernius has done us a favor and submitted the Books in Browsers hashtag (#bib20) to the Twapper Keeper tweet archiving service that will allow the FREE service to build a permanent archive of tweets from the event.

Books in Browsers 2010 began today at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and will conclude tomorrow afternoon.

The TwapperKeeper Books in Browsers tweet archive is accessible here.

Tweets can also be downloaded for offline use (or local archiving) as an Excel spreadsheet. Look for another export and download option above (and to the right) of the first tweet.

Summize provides a continuously updated set of stats about the tweets in the TwapperKeeper archive. For example, Top 10 tweeted hashtags; Top 10 tweeted URLs; Top Twitterers; and much more.

Finally, below each tweet in the archive look for the “tweet details” link. Here you’ll find info about each tweet and Twitter user. For example, for some tweets you can learn what Twitter client (including the Twitter web version) was used.

Sources: TwapperKeeper, Internet Archive

You can find the podcast here and the transcript here.

The Internet Archive is planning a meeting in San Francisco on Thu. Oct 21 – Fri. Oct 22 tentatively titled “Books in Browsers”.

The meeting will cover achievements in moving books to the web, including developments in OPDS Catalogs, vending and lending, and the design and effective deployment of ebooks and reading experiences for web environments. The portability of books and bookshelves, reader application interoperability, storage and transmission security (including encryption and caching), the legal and user consequences of book licensing vs purchase, and ramifications for user privacy and data protection are viable angles.

Currently, I anticipate that we will build a technical track, and an uber issues track, with cojoined sessions among topics that are conceptually early or rapidly evolving.

The meeting has the support of O’Reilly Media; additional sponsors may be named.

The program committee includes individuals experienced in the gamut of these issues. We are honored to have the engagement of the following (in random order):

Hugh McGuire / Bookoven
Keith Fahlgren / Ibis Reader
Pam Samuelson / UC Berkeley (BCLT)
Tom Garnett / Smithsonian Institution (BHL)
Mary Lou Jepson / Pixel Qi
Hadrien Gardeur / Feedbooks
Kat Meyer / O’Reilly Media
Daihei Shiohama / Voyager Japan

I am interested in both specific proposals and general interest in attendance, which may be restricted for space. The meeting will be held in San Francisco at the Internet Archive offices.

Please write to me with proposals.

Thanks -
Peter Brantley

And a couple of libraries are contributing scans of a few hundred older works that are still under copyright—which is what got Google in trouble. For books that are still under copyright, the library will treat a physical book and an electronic scan of that book as the same volume: it will check out one e-copy of a book for each physical version of the book it has, and while the e-copy is out the physical one cannot be checked out, or vice versa.

A checked-out e-copy will be automatically rendered inaccessible at the end of the checkout period by DRM, just as with the Overdrive and Fictionwise lending libraries.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has been very critical of Google’s Google Books project and the associated settlement. His point of view is that Google is using the courts to seize to itself the legal ability to do the sorts of things that the Internet Archive has been trying to do. It’s not surprising that Kahle would embark upon a similar plan himself.

Of course, the Authors Guild might well challenge this plan just as it challenged Google’s. Scanning books without permission is arguably against the law, and while tying e-book checkouts to owned copies of printed books is a novel idea it is unclear whether the courts would consider it a fair use. Paul Aiken of the Authors Guild said "it is not clear what the legal basis of distributing these authors’ work would be."

On the other hand, Google went from just wanting to scan books to enable searching and showing limited snippets to having a very ambitious plan to become the next big e-bookstore competing with Amazon, Google, and Apple, just by being sued by and settling with the Authors Guild. Perhaps Kahle could be hoping for the same thing.

Given the facts of mass digitization of titles, free-to-use API’s,  and social sharing of resources, the digital library branch is a reality that can be implemented.  Here’s how….

Every library needs a place to start, so our digital branch will be created on a branch of the current library web site or freely created with resources such as Google Sites or Weebly.  Using graphics from the main library site or recreating them from open-source, public domain photos and artwork, it would take only a short time to get going.

Rounding out the top three resources, we could also implement the ManyBooks catalog, Feedbooks catalog and others.  Highlighting these selections, we bring in additional illustrations and book covers through the use of the Google Book Bar and embed options from the Internet Archive.  If our digital collections have a special focus, then inserting the actual titles in our site through Google Books could help bring to attention special collections such as science fair, genealogy and/or gov. document titles.

But our library is more than historical fiction and bestsellers, we should also implement newspaper and magazine resources.  First up for this would be the Google News Archive.  While the resources are small, there are lots of ways to incorporate this into our branch.  Supplementing this, we could make available singular titles such as the Sports Illustrated Archive (you knew about this right?), People Magazine and even Time.  I didn’t mention the magazines now available on Google Books, but they certainly should be there.

The end results?  We’ve got our digital branch up and running in a matter of a few weeks.  Is this a perfect solution?  Nope…but it’s a start!  Rather than being locked into a particular vendor’s ebook implementation or ILS solution, we have an open-idea, low cost, digital library branch that serves our existing patrons and new patrons worldwide.  Our digital library costs next to nothing, uses little staff and is open 24/7.  Thoughts?  Has this already been done for your local library?  Is this a redundant idea?  Let me know in the comments below……

More resources to consider:

(SlideShare): Managing The Digital Branch

(SlideShare): Considering The Digital Library Branch

American Libraries:  Building A Digital Branch

Image Source: Tagxedo

This is worth reprinting in full. From What’s New at the Internet Archive:

From Open Library:

The Internet Archive has been scanning books for some years now, and we’re always looking for more. In addition to 1,000,000+ eBooks available to anyone available through Open Library, we’ve announced the release ofmodern books for the print-disabled community in a special format called DAISY. It’s a brand new collection – one of the largest available online. For too long, print-disabled people have been denied access to the full breadth of contemporary books, and we’d like to assist in tipping that balance back to where it should be, universal access for all readers.

We are sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books

Please help us by donating books to be scanned or with financial support for the scanning process. Based on existing foundation funding, we are sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books that are donated in this Book Drive. We’re looking for wonderful and important books for this first 10,000 and even more books and money to keep it going. We will make these digital books as available to the world as we can, including the print-disabled, and will preserve the physical book for the long term.

How Does The Book Drive Work?

You can simply send up to 100 books or drop them off in person at our headquarters:

Internet Archive Book Drive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118

If you’d like to make a donation of more than 100 books, wow! That would be wonderful, but please give us a call on +1 415-561-6767 to arrange shipping and handling.

We’d like to recognize the generosity of everyone that donates a book to the book drive. It is simplest for us to do this if you include an “Ex Libris” bookplate inside the front cover of each book you donate. That way, when we scan your donation, we will simply photograph your bookplate. This will become part of the permanent digitized version of your donation.

For additional information: http://openlibrary.org/bookdrive

The Internet Archive just doubled the number of books for the print-disabled from classic books to current novels and educational material. This is done via the relaunched website with “one webpage for every book” http://openlibrary.org.

Publicly accessible books are in the open DAISY format. The database and search engines are still catching up but it will have over 1 million volumes for this community (over 500k titles).

Included are a large number of modern books that are put in the protected DAISY format the Library of Congress uses to distribute modern books to the blind and dyslexic.

The Archive is also launching a book drive– the first 10,000 books donated to the Internet Archive will be digitized and made as widely available as we can. With support in donated great books, and hopefully also financial support, the Archive will digitize even more.

Main post on the subject is here.

If any app could be called the original iPhone e-book reader, BookShelf certainly qualifies. A predecessor, Books 1.0 (not written by Bedell), actually pre-dates Apple’s first iPhone software development kit—it was in one of the unofficial app repositories created by those hardy souls who were jailbreaking their phones to program and run apps before apps were even officially possible.

Originally just a simple unencrypted-MobiPocket-format reader, BookShelf was also the first application to allow downloading Baen Free Library and Webscription books directly from the web and into the reader. Until Baen also made EPUB-format books available and added a Stanza download catalog, BookShelf was essentially the only way to read Webscription books on the iPhone without going to a great deal of extra effort.

It is also the only one of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps (BookShelf, eReader, Stanza) to get an iPad upgrade. It is still just about the only way to read unencrypted MobiPocket books on the iPhone without running them through Calibre to convert to EPUB—but thanks to some recent changes, it can read EPUB, Plucker, FB2, LIT, and a remarkable number of other formats as well (Update: though, as Bedell notes in a comment below, some of them do have to pass through its PC-based sync conduit first).

For its first couple years, BookShelf was priced at $9.99—pretty high for an iPhone application. It has since come down to $4.99, with a free ad-supported and limited-capacity version called BookShelf Lite. The app is universal, so only need be purchased once for both the iPhone and iPad platforms. But is it still worth the money in this age of iBooks and Kindle Reader? Let’s find out.

(Portions of this review come from my 2008 review of an earlier version, updated to reflect more recent changes.)

Readability

Bookshelf offers a wide variety of font choices, including Georgia, Hevetica, Marker Felt, and a number of others. There are a couple of them, such as Bodoni 72, on the iPad that aren’t on the iPhone, but in either one there are fonts available I haven’t seen in any other reader program. However, some of these make little sense to use for book reading (for example, “DB LCD Temp”—who wants to read an entire book in pocket calculator font?). Sizes are given in points, ranging from 8 point (tiny) to 40 point (only 5 or 6 lines fit on the screen of an iPhone).

BookShelf has one of the more impressive text presentation options dialogues I’ve seen on any e-book app. Not only font face, size, and color scheme can be set, but also justification, side margins, line spacing (my preference is 135%, less than the 165% default), extra paragraph space, and others. There is a window of sample text at the top of the setup screen so you can see the effect of changes as you make them.

Oddly, BookShelf’s manual (included in the app at download) claims that the app supports automatic hyphenation, but the hyphenation option it describes is missing from the setup screen. Wonder where it went.

It is interesting to note that the justification setting can apparently be overridden by the settings of the e-book file itself—when I downloaded an e-book file directly from Baen, it remained fully justified even though I had changed the selector to left-justification only. On the EPUB e-book files I had recompiled with Calibre to remove full justification for iBooks, setting changes had full effect.

Once these options have been selected, the font faces are readable and quite clear. As with eReader, Bookshelf will rotate the screen to any of the four possible orientations of the device.

Ease of Use

Paging up and down in Bookshelf is done by thumb tapping on either the top or bottom of the screen. The text scrolls up or down in accordance with the direction you tap. (By default, tapping on the bottom pages down; flipping the “Reverse Tap Direction” switch in Settings reverses this.) You can also slide the screen up and down with your finger to scroll only part of the way, just as in Mobile Safari. Tapping in the middle of the screen opens the menu bars.

Unlike essentially every other e-book reading app available for the iPhone or iPad, BookShelf is built on a scrolling metaphor, like a web browser. Ever since the early days of the e-book, some people (such as my friend Travis Butler, who occasionally comments here) have simply preferred to read that way, sliding their thumb up or down to advance the text a line, a paragraph, or page at a time, as they like.

But the fly in the ointment is that, in programming it, Bedell was only allowed to use Apple’s published APIs—and their API for scrolling text, as opposed to page-at-a-time, simply doesn’t work for long segments of text. Bedell could fix it if he were allowed to write his own API, but that is prohibited by the developers’ agreement.

So Bedell does the best he can: each book is loaded in chunks about the size of a printed page (or several iPad screens, or even more iPhone screens). The beginning and end of each chunk is marked with a red arrow, and cannot be finger-slid past but must be tapped to advance to the next or previous chunk.

In the bottom menu bar are options to go to the settings page, lock the screen rotation, view or add bookmarks, and start autoscroll for hands-free reading. (They are all presented in a single row in the iPad version, but there is only room for half of them at a time plus a “more” icon on the iPhone version.)

The upper right menu bar contains a very small meter of progress into the book (so small as to be not really recognizable as such until enough of the book has been read that the progress dot elongates into a bar). Tapping on it brings up a slider that allows you to advance to any point in the book.

Happily, the problem that I mentioned in my prior review about accessing the download screen seems to have been an artifact of a bad installation on my iPhone. I have no such problems now.

In fact, since my previous reviews, BookShelf has gotten considerably less buggy in general, and is now almost entirely usable. And its many configuration options give it a pretty big lead over apps such as iBooks and Kindle Reader where just about all you can change is the font face and size. On the other hand, all those options also make it a lot more complicated than other e-book readers, so it might be a little more confusing to a newer user.

Adding Content

This is one area where BookShelf really shines. Over the years, BookShelf has added the ability to read a number of other formats, including EPUB, to its MobiPocket base.  It should be noted that only non-DRMed files can be loaded into Bookshelf—which means that e-books purchased in Secure Mobipocket or Secure EPUB format will not work unless a way can be found to remove the DRM. (Note that, in the United States, removing the DRM from a purchased book violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.)

Bookshelf comes with a Java-based Bonjour/TCP server application—a stripped-down webserver for e-books. It is simple to set up (though I did have to uninstall and reinstall Bonjour on my Winbox to do so) and to add content which you can access from your LAN or, with a little router configuration, from anywhere on the net.

With a little experimentation, I was easily able to make the e-book directory of my hard drive available (password-protected) and download a book from it onto my device. And since the server contains the entire directory, I do not need to worry about having to manually add every book I want to install.

But the shelfserver is also easy for publishers to integrate. That’s why Baen Books set one up for its Free Library and Webscriptions (which is now built right into the download menu of BookShelf), and there is also a public-domain-books server at iphonebookshelf.com.

And BookShelf has also added a number of other downloading options, including an internal browser to allow downloading directly from the web (a considerable improvement from BookShelf’s prior web downloading option, which required using a bookmarklet to rewrite download links on a given page) plus direct links to Feedbooks, ManyBooks, Smashwords, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and even Dropbox. The iPad version can also be loaded via drag-and-drop via the File Sharing section of the Apps tab of the iPad iTunes sync screen, as with GoodReader.

Suffice it to say that there are about a zillion ways to get an e-book into BookShelf.

Of course, one annoying thing is what happens with the book once it’s there. For some reason downloading a book from an on-line source creates a directory structure within the app—several layers deep. For instance, downloading Conflict of Honors via the Baen Webscription link puts that file four layers deep, in the “Downloads –> www.webscription.net –> Sharon Lee and Steve Miller” folder. That makes it a bit troublesome to keep track of where your books actually are.

Conclusion

I bought BookShelf as soon as I got my old 1st-generation iPod Touch, at its full price of $9.99, because it was basically the only iPhone app that read Baen e-books at that point. It was fairly buggy back then, but it was the only game in town so I put up with it. But since Stanza came out, I largely hadn’t used it until I went back and read a book in it today for the purposes of this review.

The fact is, I prefer the page-turning metaphor of eReader, Stanza, and now Kindle and iBooks. I like tapping to the left or right to jump to the next screen’s worth of text, whether it comes with a fancy page-turning animation or not. (There is a “tap left/right to scroll” option in the text settings menu, but it doesn’t seem to work for me on either the iPod Touch or iPad.) Scrolling up and down is a bit too fiddly for me, and too easy to lose track of where I had been reading before.

I’m not sorry I bought BookShelf, on the whole. It was highly useful before Baen went EPUB, and still looks pretty good today on the iPad—it’s just not the way I prefer to read. At the original price of $9.99, it would be considered a bit too high today, but $4.99 is a more decent price, especially considering that it covers both iPhone and iPad versions (and you can try out the Lite version before you buy to see if you think the paid version would meet your needs).

If you prefer the scrolling model of book reading and would like an EPUB reader that doesn’t try to pretend you’re reading a paper book (or would like to read non-DRM MobiPocket and LIT files without passing them through Calibre first), $4.99 is actually a pretty good deal—especially for the level of control you have over the way the book is displayed. BookShelf has improved a lot over the years, and if it is not necessarily as polished as iBooks, it is nonetheless impressively functional and nearly entirely bug-free.

But for people who don’t care about those things, BookShelf isn’t necessarily that much better than iBooks—and iBooks is free.