Oh, the irony! In The Five Laws of Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan argued in the 1930s for libraries as improvers of life for rich and poor alike. Now Google Books has digitized 30 million titles, but you won’t find Laws on the Web in its entirety from Google at any price. You’ll see a teaser instead, just snippets and descriptions of commercially sold paper editions. If you go to Laws’ listing on Amazon, you’ll notice that the price of a new hardback edition now starts at $45.95 from a third-party seller, plus the $3.99 shipping. Just one new hardback copy is in stock from Amazon itself, for $54.99 with free Prime shipping. Amazon itself...

It's been a little while since we've had any interesting news to share about Unglue.it, the online service provider that uses a crowdfunding method to obtain the copyrights of certain e-books, which are then made freely available to anyone—or any institution, for that matter, including libraries—interested in downloading a copy. (Unglue.it users participate by donating a financial amount of their choosing to a particular title being offered by the Unglue.it platform; if the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher releases the book under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.) [caption id="attachment_82693" align="alignright" width="194"] Gluejar CEO Eric Hellman[/caption] * * * Here at TeleRead, we've long...

I received an email earlier this week from Dr. Frank Lowney, an occasional TeleRead contributor, and the author of The Coming ePublishing Revolution in Higher Education. Dr. Lowney, who is professionally affiliated with Georgia College & State University, most definitely knows his stuff when it comes to college textbooks, and higher education in general. That's important to point out, because in his email, Dr. Lowney brought to my attention a fantastic online archive of entirely free, Creative Commons licensed textbooks. (That is to say, a completely legit archive.) And while I am familiar with the company that originally created the archive--they're known...

The Unglue.it gang is at it again, doing what they can to get the word out about the latest titles they're attempting to "unglue." One of the books, Sara Roncaglia's Feeding the City, looks fantastic. Originally written in Italian and published by Open Book Publishers, it's an ethnographic look at "the dabbawalas of Mumbai, [who] deliver hundreds of thousands of home-cooked lunches to the city’s workers [each day], with a logistics chain so efficient it’s been the subject of a Harvard Business School case study." Subtitled "Work and Food Culture of the Mumbai Dabbawalas," Feeding the City "traces the ethnography of this massive culinary cooperative:...

eReaders Not Selling Well in German Bookstores (The Digital Reader) Why Using Creative Commons Licensed Material is Not as Easy as it Looks (Techdirt) Bookish: Will it Succeed? (Digital Book World) Libraries Lobby Publishers to Change eBook Policies (Penn Live) Kindle Daily Deals: Justice Denied by J.A. Jance (and 3 others)...

In an even more wired future, what will be the needs of public libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere? Just what is the role of libraries if “a person can access much of the information in the world from a device”? How to bring about the right kind of “lasting changes”? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Global Libraries Initiative is asking some well-crafted questions of this kind in a survey I’d urge you to fill out. No small conundrum for present and future libraries is, how to pay for content? The Internet teems with free facts, raw information, as well as public domain and Creative...

I got an email this morning indicating that Creative Commons book crowdsourcing site Unglue.it is relaunching with a new payment processor and several new ungluing campaigns. Unglue.it first launched a few months ago with the goal of collecting donations to put toward “ungluing” copyrighted books—that is, buying the right to release them as e-books with permissive CC licenses. The site had one immediate success, which it recently made good on releasing. However, most of its other campaigns barely got off the ground, and more recently Amazon ceased processing its payments due to concerns over the way Unglue.it’s campaigns were structured. Per the email, Unglue.it’s...

I’m still borrowing e-books from public libraries. I loved the digital edition of the late Louis Auchincloss’s memoirs that popped up when I was browsing the electronic stacks of a library system near me here in Northern Virginia. Public libraries at their best can be Serendipity Central. But I rely much less these days on library books than before. Too often, some major e-books are AWOL from library collections or, as documented earlier this year by the Washington Post, have long waiting lists. So I turn to Amazon, the public domain or Creative Commons titles instead. Have I lost my enthusiasm for a well-stocked national digital library system, or, to...

I found a press release in my mailbox this morning about the launch of Eric Hellman’s crowd-funded Creative Commons republishing initiative for copyrighted works, Unglue.it (which we’ve mentioned a few times already here). The site has officially launched just now, with campaigns for the following five books: Michael Laser, 6-321 Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo Budding Reader, Cat and Rat Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan. The...

Found on PaidContent: A company called Gluejar has launched a new website called Unglue.it with the goal of “freeing” e-book versions of copyrighted books that do not have any yet. The site hopes to contract with the owners of particular books to determine how much money they want to allow free e-book versions of the books under a Creative Commons license, then raise that money from its users. [Site founder Eric] Hellman says Gluejar is in part a reaction to the changing role of libraries in the U.S. “We’re excited about the possibility of using libraries...

On FutureBook, Martyn Daniels looks at the question of piracy, summing up contributing factors and discussing why it is such a tricky problem. Calling it a social problem similar to drugs, gambling, drinking, and prostitution, he points out that it will probably never be eradicated. He points out that almost everybody has done it either intentionally or not, and that it is important not to alienate these people or set unrealistic goals in trying to fight it. The causes or contributing factors Daniels discusses include free digital content versus industry pricing (and taxes that target e-books while leaving p-books...

When I was a sophomore in high school, I read Catcher in the Rye. To me, the amazing thing about this book was the language. It seemed like every other word was "bastard", "goddam" or "sonofabitch". What were my teachers thinking? Imagine if the Salinger estate decided to release a Catcher in the Rye ebook with a Creative Commons License so that 10th graders around the world could read it for free. What sort of license would they choose? In particular, would they choose a "No Derivatives" license? Here's the "legal code" of the...