Note: Full text search and snippets are free to all. Various payment plans to view full text. Details below. From the Announcement (Also Includes Video and Images): The British Library and online publisher brightsolid today launch a website that will transform the way that people use historical newspapers to find out about the past. The British Newspaper Archive website will offer access to up to 4 million fully searchable pages, featuring more than 200 newspaper titles from every part of the UK and Ireland. The newspapers – which mainly date from the 19th century, but which include runs dating back to the first...

On FutureBook, Steve Emecz wonders why Barnes & Noble still hasn’t made the Nook devices, Nook Reader apps, or Nook e-books available outside the US and Canada. Amazon and Kobo, he points out, have readers and software available in the UK. Why not B&N? An excited author of mine downloaded the Nook PC app and bought a copy of his e-enhanced book this weekend and was hugely impressed (The London of Sherlock Holmes hyperlinking to Google Maps). I tried to do the same, and indeed also tried to download the exciting new Nook iPad app too...

From the Bodleian Library at Oxford University: A fifteen-month research project of the earliest surviving geographically recognizable map of Great Britain, known as the Gough Map, provides some revealing insights into one of the most enigmatic cartographic pieces from the Bodleian collections. The findings are recorded on a newly-launched website www.goughmap.org. The fifteen-month AHRC-funded [Arts and Humanities Research Council] project used an innovative approach that explores the map's 'linguistic geographies', that is the writing used on the map by the scribes who created it, with the aim of offering a re-interpretation of the Gough Map's origins, provenance, purpose and creation of which...

The US isn’t the only place where publisher e-book prices are higher than some consumers would like. While we’ve carried a number of examples where the e-book price was higher than the paper book price, most of them have focused on America. But on his blog nikf.org, Nik Fletcher rants about some British Kindle e-book price gouging. Fletcher calls back to the Metro article on piracy I mentioned here, and suggests that high pricing might be a contributing factor. He brings up the example of a Jeffrey Archer novel that is priced at £9.99 (£11.99 MSRP) for the Amazon...

It seems that without exception, any time someone notices e-book piracy, it’s suddenly a huge problem, instead of having built over nearly twenty years during which most publishers and authors who were not Harlan Ellison did not find it worth their time to bother doing anything about. An article in the Guardian today is no exception. UK writers think that a new publicity campaign is needed to educate people on why “stealing” books is wrong. (Clearly they’ve observed the success that those obnoxious, patronizing PSAs Hollywood has tacked onto theatrical movies have had—because naturally the people who pay to see movies...

E-readers have been doing pretty well lately. The Bookseller reports that the e-reader market in the UK doubled over Christmas, showing that 7% of British adults received a new e-reader during that time, bringing the total percentage of e-reader adoption by adults to 13%. The Kindle and iPad were the fastest-growing devices, but 19% of e-book downloaders say they use iPhones to read digital content, and 13% say it is the device they use most often. Perhaps most interestingly for the UK publishing industry, 61% of the people who got e-readers for Christmas had downloaded a paid-for e-book, and...

From the press release: A new portfolio of research projects will be focusing on transitions to electronic-only publication, gaps in access, the dynammics of improving access to research papers and the future of scholarly communication. The scholarly communications landscape has been transformed over the past few years, in the UK and across the world. Technological change has brought - and continues to bring - profound changes in the roles that researchers, funders, research institutions, publishers, aggregators, libraries and other intermediaries play in disseminating and providing access to quality-assured research outputs, in their goals and expectations, and in the services they provide...

Some news from the UK: Orange and T-Mobile may start offering the 3G iPad for less than its standard retail price if purchasers sign up for data contracts at the same time. The Telegraph states that their parent company, Everything Everywhere, has said that purchasers could get the iPad for £200 ($318) instead of the standard £429 ($681) cost when they sign up for an 18-month or 2-year data package for £15 ($24) per month. The plans would be available before Christmas. What the article doesn’t say is whether this deal is going to be offered in the USA...

Back in September, I mentioned FutureBook’s Nick Harkaway’s interview with a former official of the UK branch of the Pirate Party. Despite the name, the Pirate Party is not a bunch of wild-eyed file-sharing anarchists who think that information ought to be free because it “wants to be”. Rather, it is an organized political party whose platform is based on the idea that copyright has become excessive and needs to be brought back toward a fairer balance. Now Harkaway has held another brief e-mail interview with the current leader of the Pirate Party, Loz Kaye. This interview focuses on...

In a time when the progress of copyright law seems not simply stuck but actually going backward, it’s nice to see at least one country trying to move ahead. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a six-month review of UK copyright law to try to make it “fit for the Internet age.” In particular, Cameron has an eye on the United States’s doctrine of fair use, which permits limited types of unauthorized use of copyrighted material, which he believes is helpful to allow companies to innovate and produce new kinds of goods and services. At present, the...

A FutureBook survey shows some interesting responses, the Bookseller reports. 76% of those who answered thought that e-books should be priced at the same level as the least expensive discounted print version of the paper book. 60% thought that the publisher was in the best position to set that price. 43% supported agency pricing, though 75% did not think it would last for more than five years. The article goes on to quote a few comments that poll-takers left, some of them quite amusing. When asked how long agency agreements would remain in place,...

While e-music isn’t directly related to e-books, there are enough commonalities and similarities that it is often instructive to look at developments in one industry in light of the other. Yesterday, Ars Technica had an interesting report looking at a controversial statement by the former head of Warner Music in the UK, Rob Dickins, Dickins made some serious waves when he suggested that new music albums should sell digitally for as little as £1 (about $1.59). The idea is to move albums into the realm of impulse buys, making it easier for people to buy all...