While many libraries, both public and academic, have implemented digital resources for their patrons in bits and pieces, I would argue that now is the time for libraries to work on putting together a comprehensive digital branch approach, offering millions of books, millions of newspapers and magazines, and open acess 24/7.   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...

Classics ($2.99) was a great-looking iPhone app for its day. An extension of the “appbook” concept in which programmers took public-domain books, built an app framework around them, and sold them in the app store (see my review of the appbook of A Princess of Mars from this post), it bundled a number of the most well-known public domain titles together and prettied them up for iPhone-screen reading. As an implementation of that idea, it worked all right. In fact, it looked nice enough that Apple featured it in a TV commercial—and subsequently proceeded to steal its...

The last few e-readers I’ve reviewed have been corporate-, or at least company-created—crafted by teams of developers, with a very smooth and polished look to them and, with the exception of eReader, all relative latecomers to the iPhone platform. It’s time to switch things up and take a look at a much older, largely solo effort: Zachary Bedell’s iPhone/iPad universal application BookShelf (v2.3.2968). 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...

Of course I live by RSS feeds, that's how I do 90% of the content of TeleRead. I'm sure most of you, if not all of you, know about the free ebook site ManyBooks. But did you know that ManyBooks divides its books into about 60 categories and you can get an RSS feed for any, or all, of them? The feed will alert when when new books of that category are added. If you like history books just subscribe to the History feed. You can also get feeds on audiobooks, pirate tales, espionage, cooking and many,...

The New York Times has an interesting story on the tangled copyright history of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It boils down to the fact that the rights have passed through so many sets of heirs, with one widow and one divorcee involved, that there is some disagreement as to who actually owns them. For a short time, Holmes was out of copyright—then a Conan Doyle heir recovered the rights under the Copyright Act of 1976. According to a literary agent for the Conan Doyle estate, Holmes remains under copyright protection until 2023. Slightly ominous is this paragraph:...

This article reminded me of the NPR piece on e-books we mentioned the other day. In that piece, various talking heads suggested that e-books were changing the way in which we read, and hence the way in which authors would have to write from now on. On O’Reilly Radar, Sarah Milstein talks about the similar assumption that Twitter, email, and other instant, small-chunk communication methods are something entirely new and different and changing the way in which we communicate. Milstein reminds us that in the 19th century, the mail was delivered in Victorian England as many as...

Wired Correspondent Erin Biba, daughter of TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba, saw the new “Sherlock Holmes” movie and went on to download public domain books from the Holmes series. Smart move. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Here are Holmes-related listings for free e-books at: --Feedbooks. The Kindle-friendly mobile site is here, its Holmes section here. New Nook owners can read the ePub versions of these books at Feedbooks and the other sites. --Google books. Works with the Nook and with the Sony Reader. --Manybooks.net. --Project Gutenberg. You can also find free and paid Holmes books...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! A number of other sites are doing Thanksgiving lists (Ars Technica, Wired, another Wired, and Wired again on things not to be thankful for), and I thought I would assay one of my own. Of course, we all know that we have a lot more to be thankful for than just e-book-related things, but they are this site’s focus after all. There are a lot of people and companies that have made a difference in the e-book industry this year, and I thank the ones important to me below. These are the folks...

As Paul posted earlier today, Barnes & Noble’s Fictionwise’s eReader’s iPhone eReader app version 2.1 is now available for download on the App Store. As I noted in the comments to that post, this version of eReader fixes the loudest complaint about version 2.0.2 when it came out—the removal of options to access the ManyBooks free e-books site, and to access books hosted on one’s own web server. At the time, Steve Pendergrast told me that the removal was “due to a complex issue regarding the Apple Terms of Service that’s hard to even describe,” and an eReader...

That's among the questions raised in a study by psychologists and English professors (full study here---PDF alert).  One more reason to rejoice over the spread of free public domain archives on the Net? At least some Victorian novels were intended to encourage moral behavior, the researchers say. But did the intended result actually happen? To extrapolate, did Dickens' fiction really contribute to the end of sweatshops by making people more ethical? It's an issue of personal interest to me. I wrote The Solomon Scandals to tell a story, not elevate morality in D.C.  I doubt it'll reform the...

What if you could age backwards? That's the premise of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story that helped inspire a just-released movie of the same name---The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Actually there could be a little more to to the origins of the movie than that, if some fans of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer's novel, are right. For the freebie... You can download the Fitzgerald story at Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.net in a variety of formats, including ePub. What's new at Manybooks.net: Matt McClintock has been using Calibre to generate ePub, though he reports that...

Sci-fi, fantasy and public domain works are more in keeping with the tastes of typical TeleBlog readers than a Washington newspaper novel might be. Same over at many other places on the Net. Excerpts from The Solomon Scandals, however, are #2 on Feedbooks' list of "shared" items in the English language, even if we're not talking huge numbers here. Hey, my fifteen minutes. Yes, anybody can upload to Feedbooks' "shared" section," and it's one way to spread around your own excerpts. #1 is The Man Who Could Not Forget, a short story by Michael Graeme---a tasty mix...