From the Internet Archive blog: The Internet has put universal access to knowledge within our grasp. Now we need to put all of the world’s literature online. This is easier to do than it might seem, if we resist the impulse to centralize and build only a few monolithic libraries. Centralization can lead to price controls, censorship without due process, lack of reader privacy, and resistance to innovators. We need lots of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers—and lots of libraries. If many actors work together, we can have a robust, distributed publishing and library system, possibly resembling the World Wide Web. The courts...

The Bookseller has a brief report on a London roundtable in which some publishers and booksellers sounded a warning about library e-book lending. Waterstones m.d. James Daunt said that library e-lending could be disruptive to bricks-and-mortar booksellers. “If you can download a book for free and read it, why would you want to own it?” Daunt further noted that booksellers have had things “extremely easy” for a long time, and have lost focus on “the basic discipline of retailing.” He suggested that there is an opportunity for booksellers to learn to improve their financial focus and learn to run...

A decision has come down in the Georgia State University e-reserves case, which we’ve covered here, here, and here. The case concerned electronic compilations of course material that professors bundle together from books in situations where they would not be using enough material from a particular book to make it worthwhile for students to buy it. A number of publishers objected to the practice, and filed suit against Georgia State University. (Presumably if the suit was successful, they could then have gone after other universities over the same practices.) The judge has spent a great deal of time working...

Direct to Table of Contents/Links to Full Text Articles This issue of The Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) is devoted to papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Open Repositories that took place in Austin, Texas during June, 2011. Tom Cramer from Stanford served as editor for this special issue. Papers in This Issue Include: DAR: A Modern Institutional Repository with a Scalability Twist by Youssef Mikhail, Noha Adly, Magdy Nagi Document Viewers for Non-Born-Digital Files in DSpace by Elias Tzoc Repository as a Service (RaaS) by Stuart Lewis, Kim Shepherd, Yin Yin Latt, Andrea Schweer, Adam Field Chempound – a Web 2.0-inspired repository...

BoingBoing has a brief but interesting piece from a representative of Douglas County Libraries in Colorado (which we mentioned in March), which has created its own e-book lending system by dealing directly with publishers, rather than relying on a third party such as Overdrive to mediate between them. DCL has cut deals with over 800 publishers to have their works lent through DCL’s system. The library doesn’t rely only on its own system, however; it also offers books from the Overdrive and 3M platforms, as well as Freegal music. The books are available through the physical branch locations, or...

Ars Technica has a report on the Digital Public Library of America West conference from April 27th that seems to be a bit more informative than the Publishers Weekly summary we linked a week ago. Ars’s Megan Geuss reports on the challenge facing the organization, and some of the ideas presented at the event. The DPLA does have a tricky task ahead of it: The organization must be a bank of documents, and a vast sea of metadata; an advocate for the people, and a partner with publishing houses; a way to make location irrelevant to...

Although I’m still gung ho about the Digital Public Library of America, I retain some of the concerns arising in a recent MIT Technology Review article. For example, how can we  reconcile the DPLA’s various goals and serve academic and public library patrons, whose needs and interests may differ sharply? One strategy would be for public libraries, or a related nonprofit, maybe even the DPLA or a successor, to be able to buy the OverDrive distribution service, which reaches ‘more than 15,000 libraries, schools, and colleges worldwide.’ Talk up the idea well—always easier to do when a service and urgent needs already exist,...

Ernest Hemingway was a columnist for the Toronto Star from 1920-1924 where he wrote 191 stories. More than 70 of them are currently accessible via the digital archive (free). A newsprint version of the material is also available for sale. Direct to ‘The Hemingway Papers’ Digital Archive The legendary writer’s reporting from the Toronto Star archives, featuring historical annotations by William McGeary, a former editor who researched Hemingway’s columns extensively for the newspaper, along with new insight and analysis from the Star’s team of Hemingway experts. See Also: Toronto Star publishes digital archive of Ernest Hemingway columns: Young ‘Papa’ wrote of bootleggers &...

From the press release by the National Federation of the Blind: With the assistance of the National Federation of the Blind, four blind patrons of the Free Library of Philadelphia—Denice Brown, Karen Comorato, Patricia Grebloski, and Antoinette Whaley—have filed suit (case number: 12-2373) against the library because they cannot access one of the library’s programs for which they are eligible.  The Free Library of Philadelphia has instituted and announced plans to expand a program in which free NOOK Simple Touch e-readers, which are manufactured and sold by Barnes & Noble, are loaned to patrons over the age of fifty.  Unlike some...

From the Internet Archive blog: Thank you for your willingness to invest in the future of publishing and readership. Libraries and publishers have a lot in common: we connect writers with readers which promotes literacy scholarship and citizenship. We want to buy more digital books from you. We currently buy, lend, and preserve eBooks from publishers and booksellers, but we have not found many eBooks for sale at any price.  The Internet Archive is running standard protection systems to lend eBooks from our servers through our websites, openlibrary.org and archive.org.   In this way, we strive to provide a seamless experience for our library...

The project was first announced in February.  via LIBER: The newest LIBER’s project’s website has been launched in co-operation with the Berlin State Library, the Europeana Newspapers project leader. The Europeana Newspapers project aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. Direct to the New Web Site See Also: Europe: More Than 10 Million Digitized Newspaper Pages Coming to Europeana (February 16, 2012)   (Via LJ INFOdocket.)...

From Publishers Weekly.  More in the article: On April 27, DPLA West brought together over 400 librarians, technologists, public policy advocates, and a very small number of publishers at the Internet Archive in San Francisco to discuss the progress of the most visible effort yet to forge a common digital library for both Americans and the world: the nascent Digital Public Library of America. The best thing about the meeting, the second major public gathering of the DPLA, was that it was full of hope and aspirations. Of course, that was also the worst thing about the DPLA meeting, too. Born of...