From the UTSA Press Announcement: UTSA officials announced Thursday the opening of the Applied Engineering and Technology (AET) Library, the nation's first completely bookless library on a college or university campus. The 80-person capacity library, which caters to College of Sciences and College of Engineering students, is a satellite of the larger John Peace Library on the Main Campus. Electronic research is central to the AET Library. Instead of storing printed volumes, the library offers students a rapidly growing collection of electronic resources including 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions. Skilled science and engineering...

The v3.01 update is now final and ready for download from Amazon servers, for all Kindle 3's.  Apparently, their private feedback was as good as feedback seen on the Amazon forums. See yesterday's original report of the v3.01 update for the details that were in that. At the linked page (above), Amazon also states: ' We're excited to announce that a new, free software update is available for the latest generation Kindle 6" device.  This software update adds the ability to create a new Amazon.com account directly from your Kindle, as well as additional performance...

Editor's note: this compilation of Tony's posts will be updated on a monthly basis. PB Airborne: Flightglobal Archives for your eReader! Historical Military Documents! (Library Guides Series: History) G-Men, the OSS and My iPad! Lunar Conspiracies and This Old BBS: Ancient Files Equals Good Reading! Murder, Mayhem and the Space Rocket: Pulp Adventures to Go! College Archive Resources! (Library Guides Series: Searching) Shelved! Google Books–My Library (Library Guides Series: Technical) Looking for a title? (Library Guides Series: Searching) Come On In: The New Improved Open Library! Superman and More: Comics on your E-Reader! Mabry’s Historical Text Archive…. Fall In! Military Ebook Resources! Tabbloid It! The Digital Daily: how to easily get historic newspapers...

Amazon wants feedback on an "early preview of the next software update" for Kindle 3 and refers to this update-preview as software update version 3.01. They stress this is offered so that "Customers who want to try this early release of the software and provide feedback can download the update from their servers." Amazon explains that this update will add ' the ability to create a new Amazon.com account directly from your Kindle, as well as additional performance improvements. After installing this update, please share your feedback with us at kindle-response@amazon.com.  We look forward to hearing about...

Within the last 60 days there has been a bevy of announcements of new ereading devices. Amazon announced what is popularly called the Kindle 3 and Sony has announced 3 new models — the 350, 650, and 950. How far behind other makers will be is hard to tell, but the upcoming holiday season should be a good one for device buyers. So the question is this: Is this the time to take the plunge and buy a dedicated ereading device if you don’t already own one? The companion question, of course, is if you own one that is more than...

 Yesterday we received an email from the University of Chicago Press alerting us that their free e-book of the month was a replica of the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style from 1906. TeleRead reported the news. TeleRead Writes: Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM—even though, since it was originally published in 1906, this book is well within the public domain by now. (Oddly, I can’t seem to find any public domain version of it on-line, at least not in...

It's been a big news week in Australia in the world of ebooks - as it has overseas. But, for this much-overlooked corner of the world, ebooks have started to take their first tentative steps into the mainstream, and the logjam of rights, content and device issues has started to free up. In short, some important players in book publishing and selling here have evidently been looking at the whole "ebook thing" and decided that rather than a fad, it's the inevitable direction of the book industry. To be fair, I'm sure this happened a while back but, aside from one major...

   1. Smashwords Smashwords continues to kick goals in self-publishing. In an increasingly crowded market, I just don’t think you can beat Smashwords for ease of use, price (you can’t do better than free), and distribution. Fling your words to Smashwords, and you’ll quickly end up with an ebook in multiple formats, playable on all devices, and distributed to iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store. Soon they’ll be adding Amazon to the already impressive list. The website could use prettying up, but this offering is the best one-stop-shop free solution out there. Other services...

From the Announcement: The American Council of Learned Societies’ Humanities E-Book has gone live with Koha. Eileen Gardiner, Director of ACLS Humanities E-Book, says, “ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) needed a secure and friendly environment in which to create and archive the MARC records that it distributes for its collection… Galen Charlton, VP for Data Services at Equinox, says, “I am pleased to welcome ACLS to the Koha community, and I take special note that they will be using Koha not as a traditional library but in support of their e-book MARC record distribution service. The...

Imagine only being able to open one window or application at a time on your laptop. Work for a bit in Excel and when you need to switch to Word, you've got to closer the former before you open the latter. Or what if you want to open two spreadsheets at the same time? Imagine you had to close the first before you could open the second. That's silly, right? On a regular computer, yes, it is. So why do we accept those sorts of restrictions on our ereader devices? I can't open two books...

 + Textbooks Up Their Game (by Jeffrey Trachtenberg via Wall Street Journal) Although electronic book sales have exploded, digital college textbooks have been slow to get off the ground, in part because of high prices and hardware concerns. Now, a former Apple Inc. employee, Matt Mac Innis, is trying to shake up the market with a new approach that taps into the iPad’s strengths. His tech start-up, Inkling, is introducing its first four full-length interactive college textbooks using its software platform, which is designed specifically for Apple’s iPad—a marked departure from e-textbooks that are almost...

 + The Legendary Ray Bradbury Says No to E-Books, Tells Yahoo to “Go to Hell” (by Susan King, LA Times) + Sony ‘plans two new ebook readers’ (via The Telegraph) See Also: New Sony Reader eBook Devices Coming Soon (via Sony Insider) + E-Readers are Dead. Long Love E-Reading! (by Harry McCracken, Technologizer.com) + A Very Brief Intro: Digital Rights Management (via Computeractive) + Digital books are changing our reading patterns (by Jeremy Wagstaff, Jakarta Post) + eBooks – Year Two (by Kenneth C. Green, Inside Higher Ed) Green identifies three critical issues re: e-books in higher-ed: 1) Price 2) Features and Functions Although they are “Digital...