Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

Over the last few days, I’ve done something I’ve always meant to get around to but hadn’t yet: worked my way through the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories via their posting on Google Books. (Except for the last story collection, of course, which is not yet in the public domain in the US.) After that, I happened onto an interesting Conan Doyle work called Through the Magic Door, in which the author looks at his own bookshelf and discusses each of the works that are dear to his own heart. The first few paragraphs of the book especially...

On Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody takes a look at the interesting case of why Project Gutenberg has two copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost that were produced within a few months of each other. Project Gutenberg EBook #20, October 1991, was hand-typed by volunteer Judy Boss (who subsequently got a scanner). However, Project Gutenberg EBook #26, from February 1992, was a revision of, literally, the oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg. It pre-dates Hart’s famous decision to type the Declaration of Independence by a good six years, dating back to 1964-1965 and originally rendered in all capital letters by Dr. Joseph...

Here is the first ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the other two parts in days to come. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how...

On The Next Great Generation, Julia Dawidowicz discusses her experience with e-book reading. She starts with her relationship with paper books, both as reading material and as physical artifacts. (It seems quite a few people can’t seem to divorce the word from the material it’s written on, and those tend to be the ones with the hardest time adopting to e-books.) But to be fair, Dawidowicz did decide to give e-books a chance—but when she did, she ran into the same problem about which both Joanna and I have ranted at length: the tyranny of the typo. ...

To commemorate its 40th anniversary this week, Marie Lebert wrote a short 15 page history of Project Gutenberg, from its first document on 4 July 1971 ("The United States Declaration of Independence"), to the founding of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to the posting of its 30,000th book this past April ("The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia"). You can download the PDF at gutenbergnews.org, and Mike Cook says that something with "more in-depth details" will follow. Via eBookNewser...

On Monday July 4th, the World Public Library's annual World eBook Fair launches, which will combine works from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and other public collections to create a massive 6.5 million title catalog. The collection will include not just ebooks but other media like music and movies, as well as sheet music and dance choreography. 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....

Lately, I have been working my way through the works of science fiction writer H. Beam Piper. Piper was one of the great science fiction writers of the fifties and early sixties, and, tragically, he committed suicide right before his works' popularity really took off. Perhaps as a result of the disorder brought about by his untimely demise, the copyrights on many of Piper's works were never renewed. They now reside in the public domain, where they can be read for free on sites like Project Gutenberg, or the Baen Best Of Gutenberg Science Fiction CD. Recently, writer...

On her blog Words About Words, Charlotte English takes a look at the notion that e-book readers are the province of the wealthy, or at least the well-off. There is a perception, she notes, that the readers are expensive, and filling it with e-books is more so if you buy at full price. However, this isn’t quite true in practice. English suggests that the sort of people who would be likely to buy e-books at full price are the same sort who walk into bookstores every weekend and come out with four or five new books each visit—and nobody...

In February, I covered the International Sheet Music Library Project, a sort of Project Gutenberg-like e-repository for public-domain sheet music. As I mentioned at the time, music publishers are not very happy about this site, as it undercuts their lucrative business of selling printed versions of public domain music without having to pay anybody royalties. Lately, this unhappiness has come to a head with the British trade group Music Publishers Association of the UK sending a DMCA takedown notice to the ISMLP’s domain registrar, GoDaddy. Under the terms of the DMCA, GoDaddy had no choice but to disable the...

I’ve been using my Kobo reader for a while now, and will get into my own experiences with it soon. But for this review I’m going to concentrate on the experience of getting my Dad set up with his Kobo today. I went down to visit over the weekend, and took the opportunity to get it all set up for him.(He had already ordered a smart tough zipper case for it.) Dad found the set-up instructions rather confusing—he said after reading them he didn’t know anything more than when he’d begun. But since he had me...

Usually these posts are for questions by readers, but I had a burning e-book-related question that I need answered, and I can’t figure out a better place to do it than here. I’m just about to start preparing the Kobo Reader my Dad asked me to buy for him, and as I mentioned before he’s a huge fan of Anthony Trollope. I’d like to load the Kobo up with every Trollope work I can, and there are 76 of them on Project Gutenberg—but downloading them one at a time could be rather time-consuming. And Project Gutenberg does not keep...