From a NY Times Article by Patricia Cohen: The painstakingly slow job of transcribing often hard-to-decipher handwritten documents from history’s lead players — not to mention a lack of funds — has meant that most originals are seen by a just a handful of scholars and kept out of the public’s reach altogether. After more than five decades, only slightly more than half of James Madison’s papers have been transcribed and published, while work on Thomas Jefferson’s papers, begun in 1943, probably won’t be finished until around 2025. Now the scholars behind the Bentham Project think they may have come up with a better...

From a NY Times Article (by Julie Bosman via Austin American-Statesman) E-books now make up 9 to 10 percent of trade-book sales, a rate that grew hugely this year after accounting for less than half that percentage by the end of last year. Publishers are predicting that digital sales will be 50 percent higher or even double in 2011 what they were in 2010. January could be the biggest month ever for e-book sales, as possibly hundreds of thousands of people download books on the e-readers that they receive as Christmas gifts. [Clip] But publishers have not yet figured out how to market e-books...

+ Exclusive: Google ebookstore rep hints at timetable for Australia (Teleread) + Indie Bookstores Opt-In to Google eBooks (Chicagoist) + Google Books: Solid But Not Worth Switching For (tapscape) + Five-Million-Book Google Database Gets a Workout, and a Debate, in Its First Days (Arts Beat, New York Times) Via Resource Shelf...

From the Encyclopædia Britannica Blog Top 10 Most-Read Articles on Britannica for 2010 Here are The Top 3 From the List: 1. French Revolution 2. Romanticism 3. Civil Rights Movement Plus, a Few Bonus Nuggets: + Barack Obama ranked at #258, while Ronald Reagan, the most-read U.S. presidential article, was 19th + India was the 2nd-most-viewed country article; China was 29th + Sir Isaac Newton (#42) bested Shakespeare (#43) and JFK (#44) Top 10 Most-Viewed Images on Britannica.com for 2010 Here are The Top 3 From the List: 1. Bones of the hand and wrist 2. Posterior view of the muscles of the human leg 3. Bernese mountain dog Via Resource Shelf...

Most of the the press and commentary we've seen about Google's new Ngram Viewer has been extremely positive (here’s our post from last week with links to several articles). However, today we came across a very interesting and very well written/documented blog post by Natalie Binder, a librarian and information science student at Florida St. University. "Google’s word engine isn’t ready for prime time" (by Natalie Binder, The Binder Blog) Here are two brief paragraphs from the blog post: The whole idea of Ngrams is built on a shaky foundation: the accuracy of Google’s optical character recognition (OCR) software. OCR is how a...

From a WSJ "Digits" Article: A Japanese consortium of book, e-book, magazine and digital comic publishers issued a stern rebuke of Apple’s enforcement of copyrights on its App Store. The group said certain works by renowned Japanese authors Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino have been illegally scanned and distributed over the App Store. In a joint press release on Tuesday, the Japan Book Publishers Association, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, The Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan, and Digital Comic Association said Apple’s distribution of content that clearly infringes copyright is “illegal.” “The associations we represent believe that Apple bears grave responsibility for...

As some publishers consider paywalls (and they're already in place many place) here's one that removed its paywall from their web site. From an E&P Article: This week, it tore down its website paywall, allowing visitors to view more of the magazine's exclusive content. "We have not been big believers in paywalls," said Duncan McIntosh, president of Duncan McIntosh Company, Inc. (DMC), which publishes E&P. "Paywalls in name alone connote a psychological negative, which is one reason we have never been big believers. Nielsen had been using one for a number of years, but nothing during the past year has changed our opinion...

Google eBooks is now available on the web at http://books.google.com/ebooks Press Review: + Official Blog Post and Video We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks—everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage. In addition to a full-featured web reader, free apps for Android and Apple devices will make it possible to shop...

From the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: The JISC funded OpenBib project, of which OKF is a partner, announced last week in collaboration with the British Library the release of 3 million open bibliographic records to the community. This release represents a milestone fpr open bibliography as it represents the first substantial corpus of bibliographic data to be released in an open form by a national library. As reported in the announcement post: We have initially received a dataset consisting of approximately 3 million records, which is now available as a CKAN package. This dataset consists of the entire British National Bibliography, describing new books published...

The Digital Library Blog from OverDrive has announced the mobile "Virtual Branch website provided to partners has gotten a facelift. The redesigned page is for the "Virtual Branch" mobile web site that is available (via partners) to all users WITHOUT having to download an app. Of course, the user only sees titles available for their library. It's very nice to see this update. Why? It's easy to forget that many mobile users don't have access to apps or (for whatever reasons) don't want to download them. The mobile web site will receive another update in December when OverDrive releases apps for iPhone and...

From an Article by David Sarno: "It's very common for people to say, 'Why do I need a library when I've got a computer?' " said Pam Sandlian-Smith, director of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District. "We have to reframe what the library means to the community." In the struggle to stay relevant — and ultimately to stay open — libraries are reinventing themselves in ways unimaginable even a few years ago, preparing for a future in which most materials can be checked and read from a home computer, smart phone or electronic reading device. University and public libraries are rushing to push...

Wordnik continues to be one of our favorite (useful, educational, fun) online databases. It provides access to definitions from a number of dictionaries and other word resources, thesaurus, word/phrase translation option, pronunciations (audio), tools to create and share word lists, and much more. In the past few days Wordnik announced that they've added truncation (including left-hand truncation) and a number of wildcards to search the main database and lists. From the Wordnik Blog: The * wildcard matches any number of characters: http://www.wordnik.com/search/*tacular ? matches any single character: http://www.wordnik.com/search/f?t Or you can limit single-character wildcards to just vowels or just consonants with @ and # respectively: http://www.wordnik.com/search/f@rt http://www.wordnik.com/search/#at Searching without...