From A PQ Announcement: ProQuest will digitize more than 30,000 rare early books from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, capturing every volume in high-resolution color scans. This is the third major European national library to participate in ProQuest’s Early European Books project after the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. As with the agreements in Denmark and Italy, the material will be free to access in the host country. [Clip] ProQuest will scan the library’s holdings up to 1700, beginning with books printed in the Netherlands before moving onto works from other...

According to ebookmagazine, bol.com, an online book retailer, has launched new ereader and shopping apps on the iOS and Android platform. Both are aimed at Dutch readers. The Android app will come preloaded on all Galaxy Tablets and smartphones bol sells and the iOS app will be available on the iTunes store. txtr CEO Christophe Maire said the Dutch eBook market “is ahead of most other European countries” with more 1500 eBooks are downloaded per day. As with txtr’s own-label offering, the app allows readers to buy new titles and ‘side load’ existing ePub titles protected by Adobe’s DRM –...

Techdirt has a couple of pieces about digital piracy today. First, a Dutch court has ruled that it is actually advantageous to right-holders (at least in the Netherlands) that unauthorized download sites exist, because the downloads from those sites help to pump up the amount of the Dutch private copying levy. The Court of Appeal stated that the private copying exemption in the Dutch Copyright Act does not differentiate between copies made from legal or illegal sources. With reference to statements made by the Minister of Justice, the Court argued that the legitimate interest of...

This looks like an interesting new service for reading articles. Publishers set the prices and will receive 70% of the income. It has been launched in the Netherlands and they are working on an international version. Here's a short video: ...

From official Inside Google Books Blog: That team is from the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), and as of today, we'll be working in partnership to add to the library's own extensive digitisation efforts. We'll be scanning more than 160,000 of its public domain books, and making this collection available globally via Google Books. The library will receive copies of the scans so that they can also be viewed via the library's website. And significantly for Europe, the library also plans to make the digitised works available via Europeana, Europe's cultural portal. The books we'll be scanning constitute...

From the Ereaderclub in Holland. Here is a Google translation: The entourage EDGE ™ is a revolutionary device, it features an LCD touchscreen that runs on Google Android and the other side it has an e-Ink screen using a stylus to navigate, hence the name "Dual Book. EDGE is the African Amer Inc Entourage. developed together with students and has helped it ideal for this group. Ndigo Business Ltd, the importer and distributor of the popular Entourage EDGE ™ Dual Book for Benelux, distribute today's entourage EDGE ™ in the Benelux. That demand is high evidenced by the many orders during...

Thanks to a tweet by edejager, I picked this up on the eReaders website. The original text is in Dutch and here is a Google translation: The Dutch company iRex Technologies has applied for suspension of payments, reports the FD. Disappointing sales of the DR800, the last descendant of the iRex ereaderfamilie have led to financial difficulties which the company has been trapped, said Hans Brons CEO iRex-. Philips spinoff iRex Technologies was the foundation of electronic paper as currently applied in many eReaders. The company launched in 2006, the iLiad eReader, one of the first commercially available eReaders which...

Image: The Duck piracy ring's plant. Source: Disney.A reader of the FOK blog noticed that a comic in this week's Dutch "Donald Duck" magazine is a bit too close for comfort to the rhetoric typically spouted by the local (Disney-sponsored) MPAA office, Brein. In a two page story that sees Donald Duck trying to sell illegal copies of a music CD, only to be thwarted in the end by Scrooge McDuck, the nephews explain their reasons for wanting to buy the expensive (30 dollar!), non-pirated CD: "But that's not fair! This CD is COPYRIGHTED! If nobody would buy CDs anymore,...