Category: Books
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Interview with BookSwim
I mentioned BookSwim a couple of months ago. Being sold as Netflix for books, it’s still not available to the public, but Joe Wikert has a brief interview with co-founder George Burke that you might find interesting. Technorati Tags: Books, NetFlix
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Show off Vista with a Library example
I’m not planning on installing Vista anytime soon, but if you happen to have access to a new Vista machine you should take a look at the updated version of British Library Turning The Pages. The application developer, Tim Sneath, makes it sound like a pretty nice thing to behold! (btw, the WPF mentioned by…
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I have to go to the Euphamism
My colleague Margy keeps a blog for students in a Journalism class she teaches, and just posted about a piece in The Globe and Mail about an author who got nailed for plagiarism, though the admission is only that his book contains “elements [that] . . . closely resemble or are indistinguishable from passages”… I…
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Help Tod with his radio piece on Google Downloadable Books
I haven’t taken the time yet to read up on the reports of Google’s proposed book download project, but CBC Technology Reporter Tod Maffin is asking for your help in fact-checking a piece he’s putting together for a Thursday AM airing. For a really short piece aimed at the general public I think he’s pretty…
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7 Things You Should Know About E-Books
The latest entry in the excellent EDUCAUSE series is the 2-page 7 Things You Should Know About E-Books. On a related note, I have had the Califa E-books, E-audio and other E-content website open in a Firefox tab for about three weeks now, but have not yet spent the time to go through it. Technorati…
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UPenn Online Books Page
The Centered Librarian points to The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania, a listing of over 25,000 free books on the Web. While the site does appear to be indexed in Google, it might still be worth a personal visit if you’re searching for something. Probably because it only appeared on the site…
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BookSwim – NetFlix for Books
Michael Stephens at Tame the Web points to an upcoming service called BookSwim that will launch the 1st quarter of 2007. Basically they’re going to do the NetFlix thing for books – for a subscription fee (amount unknown), you can enter your name in a queue for one of their 80,000 titles and they’ll ship…
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ebooks vs pbooks
In a meeting this AM one of my colleagues wondered aloud how close we were to having a majority of books available online. The consensus was not very close yet, and Walt Crawford happened to offer some statistics today to corroborate that. And in a segue that would only happen in my mind, BoingBoing also…
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Tim says Book Search Should Work Like Web Search
Tim O’Reilly, long a proponent of Google Book Search, has a post in which he laments the fact that books housed in the different book scanning projects (Google Books, OCA, Amazon Search Inside) are not searchable by search engines other than those provided by their hosts. Surely it will only be a matter of time…
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Book sales get a lift from Google scan plan
Hmm, looks like I was right (me and every other sane person); publishers are starting to admit that the books that are available through Google Book Search and Amazon’s Search Inside program are <gasp!> actually selling more copies! Some quotes from the Reuters piece: ""Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers," said…