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...

We love year-ends lists and rankings around here and its time to get started for 2010. A few minutes ago Amazon posted several lists: 1) Top 100 Books Selected By Editors at Amazon 2) Top 100 Books Selected By Customers If you want sample these two lists and review titles in close to 24 categories use this page. It provides direct links to all of the lists. And Don't Forget the Kindle: 3) Best Kindle E-Books of 2010 You'll find the links to all of the lists and additional material on this webpage Category Lists Include Selections from Both Editors and Customers (They're All Listed and Linked in the First Column): + Audiobooks +...

We posted about WorldReader twice so far this year. Today, some exciting news from WorldReader will make for post number three. First, in April we linked to news about the WorldReader program sending Kindles (with the help of Amazon) to test the e-reader in four African nations and see if it can help boost literacy. Testing in Ghana, Rwanda, and Kenya. Second, at the beginning of this month (October 2010), we linked to several articles about WorldReader announcing plans to digitize books by African authors and sell them via Amazon.com. More than 10 titles are already on sale. Today, news that Random House has donated "thousands of...

From the Announcement: This new OCLC Research prototype presents a page each for more than 1800 publishers from around the world. WorldCat Publisher Pages prototype is an outgrowth of the OCLC Publisher Name Authority File, as well as the OCLC WorldMap and the OCLC Audience Level activities. [Clip] The WorldCat Publisher Pages prototype allows users to select a major publisher, and then to explore its publication history as reflected in the WorldCat database. Users can select a publisher either from a cloud, or via search. The Pages represent more than 1800 publishing entities (including imprints), including the largest publishers in the U.S., U.K.,...

From Asia Pulse: A common e-book format will likely be available in Japan as early as April, making content viewable on any reader device. Sharp Corp. and e-book software developer Voyager Japan Inc. will submit the specifications of their formats free of charge to the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan. The trade organization, consisting of 41 major publishers, will then create a common format by the end of March. The government will provide 150 million yen (US$1.8 million) as a subsidy. Currently, publishers must pay fees when they convert their e-book content to fit various formats created by reader device manufacturers. This has...

 Yesterday, the Internet Archive and more specifically, the Open Library, posted a few photos of a new reading desk (aka Reading Desk 2.0) that includes the IA BookReader. Included in the set of photos is a pictire of IA Founder, Brewster Kahle, using the IA BookReader at Reading Desk 2.0. For those of you who want the tech specs of what you're seeing in the photos: Hardware: HP L2105tm multitouch monitor, connected to laptops running Windows 7 with the HP touchscreen drivers. Software: The Internet Archive BookReader (with mang’s new multitouch support code) running in Firefox 4 beta 6 for multitouch support. The BookReader...

From the Announcement (via Israel Antiquities): As part of the celebrations on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of its establishment, the Israel Antiquities Authority is launching a unique project – The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library – to document the entire collection of the Dead Sea Srolls. A major lead gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, with additional major funding from the Arcadia Foundation and the support of Yad Hanadiv Foundation, will enable the Israel Antiquities Authority [IAA] to use the most advanced and innovative technologies available to image the entire collection of 900 manuscripts comprising c. 30,000...

From a JISC (UK) Announcement: Visitors to OldWeather.org, which launches today, will be able to retrace the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships including historic vessels such as HMS Caroline, the last survivor of the 1916 Battle of Jutland still afloat. The naval logbooks contain a treasure trove of information but because the entries are handwritten they are incredibly difficult for a computer to read. By getting an army of online human volunteers to retrace these voyages and transcribe the information recorded by British sailors we can relive both the climate of the past and key moments in naval...

From a NARA Announcement: The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grantmaking arm of the National Archives, is pleased to announce a cooperative agreement with The University of Virginia (UVA) Press to make freely available online the historical documents of the Founders of the United States of America. The NHPRC and UVA Press will create a new web site which provides access to the fully annotated published papers of key figures in the nation’s Founding era. The project is designed to include the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. The National...

From a Newspaper Article: ...LSU Libraries recently announced the availability of six historical Louisiana newspapers online through its Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project. The six newspapers – The Carrollton Sun, the Louisiana Democrat, the Ouachita Telegraph, The Morning Star and Catholic Messenger, the West Feliciana Sentinel and the Feliciana Sentinel – are available for searching online at the Chronicling America website. The newspapers are the first installment in a collection that, by September 2011, will include 100,000 pages from more than 50 Louisiana newspapers. Learn More About the Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project and Access a List of Papers Source: The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA) See Also:Chronicling America Homepage...

Update: Two Mechanical Translations of the Guide (Discussed in the Article Below) by the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP). 1. via Microsoft Translator 2. via Google Translate From a China Daily News Story: The country's first regulation to guide the development of the electronic-book industry was released by the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) over the weekend. The "e-book" addressed in the regulation is specifically digital content - formatted as print, images, audio and video - that is downloaded over the Internet and read on handheld devices, such as the Amazon Kindle or the Apple iPad. The regulation, designed to improve the development of...

Yesterday, we posted that Bing/Microsoft and the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) announced a deal allowing Bing to index and provide greater visibility to the contents of the Gallica database of digitized books, maps, manuscripts, images, periodicals, etc. If you're interested in reading the complete news release (with a few additional details)it's available here in French (PDF). If you don't read French, simply select your favorite mechanical translation and the cut, copy, and paste the text. More info including some stats about what's in the Gallica database here. Via Resource Shelf ...