From the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Announcement: As part of its work on the 2011-2012 Key Initiatives, the IFLA Governing Board appointed a working group to draft a background paper on digital lending. At its April meeting the IFLA Governing Board endorsed this paper, and we are now pleased to present a version for download. The paper attempts to: Provide an overview of the issues relating to eBooks in libraries; Summarise the current positions of publishers in both the scholarly publishing and trade publishing sectors; Summarise the differences in the way that academic/research libraries and public libraries address the issue of digital collections; Address...

Published by Diversion Books and available on Amazon, B&N, iTunes and Kobo this is a new type of ebook.  From the website: “Unconventional and innovative, this is the future of e-publishing here and now—a thriller you not only read, but interact with. Pretty cool and completely fascinating. Attention everyone with an e-reader, don’t miss W. Craig Reed’sThe Eagle and the Snake.” —Steve Berry, bestselling author of The Columbus Affair In The Eagle and the Snake, NCIS agent Jon Shay is the half-Chinese illegitimate son of a politician. He’s also a former Navy SEAL working with operators from Team Six to track down an Iraqi...

New Features Kindle Touch/4 driver: Upload cover thumbnails when sending books to device by USB to workaround Amazon bug of not displaying covers for sync-enabled books Support for updating metadata in FB2 files Set a different background color when choosing formats to not delete as opposed to choosing format to delete. E-book viewer: Add an option to prevent the up and down arrow keys from scrolling past page breaks Get Books: Remove ebookshoppe.com at the website's request Bug Fixes PDF Input: Support image rotation commands in PDF files. Fixes the long standing problem of some images being flipped when converting from PDF in calibre. Fix a regression in...

From the press release: As hundreds of thousands of admirers of the Golden Gate Bridge begin to converge on the San Francisco Bay area to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the world-renowned icon, the California Historical Society is releasing its first multimedia eBook for iPads to capture the rich history and amazing story of the Bridge through a selection of rarely seen artwork, photographs, video, memorabilia, stories, images and much more. Published by The California Historical Society and produced by Sol Editions and Wild Blue Studios, the eBook was funded through a grant provided by UnitedHealthcare.The free iPad eBook, “A Wild Flight of...

From a ProQuest press release: London, 24 May 2012.   HM the Queen launches online resource of all Queen Victoria’s Journals Her Majesty The Queen today launched a unique online resource that makes available all the personal journals of Queen Victoria.  The Bodleian Libraries working in partnership with The Royal Archives and information company ProQuest, have for the first time ever, made the private records of one of the world’s most influential public figures available for the public to access at www.queenvictoriasjournals.org. The journals, which span Victoria’s lifetime and consist of 141 volumes numbering over 43,000 pages, have never been published in their entirety...

From the press release: - Louise Burke, Executive Vice President and Publisher, announced today that Pocket Books, America’s first paperback publisher, has re-launched its Pocket Star line as an eBook-only imprint. As it did in print, Pocket Star will continue to feature bestselling and debut authors in popular genres including women’s fiction, romance, thrillers, urban fantasy, and mystery. Louise Burke said, “Similar to how mass market has served as a platform to develop future hardcover authors, it is our mission to use Pocket Star’s new digital-only format to establish new voices in the marketplace. An eBook imprint is flexible, cost-effective, cutting-edge and makes sense in today’s marketplace. Under...

OverDrive APIs that were supposed to launch in April are now set to become available in July. From the OverDrive Digital Library Blog: OverDrive’s product and development teams have been hard at work developing a suite of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable approved vendors to deeply integrate OverDrive-hosted catalogs and nearly 1 million digital titles with their apps and platforms. In July, we’ll launch the OverDrive Developer Portal along with the first set of OverDrive APIs. As part of the development process, we’ve been working with a group of booksellers, publishers, school, library, discovery platform and mobile technology partners to collect...

The new version of the OverDrive library app, for e-books and audiobooks, has just appeared for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad III. Compared to past incarnations, 2.4.2 should delight many a patron. Users of Apple’s IOS operating system will enjoy ‘more control over text justification, line spacing, page margins, and font selection.’ And the just-released Android variant from OverDrive even offers double- and triple-column options in landscape mode, and serif, nonserif and typewriter-like monospaced styles in both regular and bold. Might such marvels from OverDrive on the way for my iPad soon? I’ve long begged OverDrive for all-text bolding, and I thank the company for responding...

From an email sent to me by Gale: There are very few magazines that are able to stand the test of time while so accurately capturing the moods and attitudes of an entire country. Liberty Magazine, a weekly that rivaled the Saturday Evening Post in its heyday, has found new life within the family of Gale Digital Collections. Gale today launched the Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950, a complete digitization of the entire run of Liberty Magazine, nearly 1,400 issues, with more than 17,000 fiction and non-fiction articles and thousands of advertisements all in a searchable, full-color format. If the Stanley Cup playoffs have got you interested in...

 From the website.  I love the logo so I'm reprinting it bigger than usual.  Stories are available on the website or in ePub form for free, or in Kindle format for $1. GREAT AUTHORS INSPIRE US. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, a magazine by Electric Literature, publishes one story a week, each chosen by today’s best authors or editors. Recommended Reading is released on a four week curation cycle: beginning with a story chosen by Electric Literature, followed by...

Yesterday I was a little unfair to Easons for the pronouncements of the company’s spokesperson and the tone of the article on its ebook strategy which suggested the company was about to embark on a  mission to build a rival platform to B&N and Amazon, something that would surely have been a valiant, if doomed, effort. When I thought about it for the rest of the day though it got me thinking about just how much ebooks are changing the profile of book publishing and bookselling and how quickly that is happening. For instance I am almost certain of two things...

From the press release by the Book Industry Study Group: ...The Global eBook Monitor finds that men are slightly more likely to have engaged with the digital book market than women. The 18-24 age group leads in use, just a little ahead of those aged 25-34. However, that may change shortly. 'Although current e-book use tends to decrease with age, those most likely to come into the market in the next six months are somewhat older than current buyers,' said Ms. Henry. 'That's the pattern we're seeing in both the U.S. and the U.K.' The Global eBook Monitor (GeM)...