Scooper on libraries

E-books and the e-book readers are getting cheaper. You don't need an expensive e-reading device to read e-books. Today, more people read ebooks on smart phones like the iPhone than on dedicated e-reading devices. Plus they can be read on computers, laptops and netbooks.

However, Amazon has released an international version of its electronic reader, the Kindle, and reduced the price by US$100 to US$259 (NZ$346). It will be available in Australia, Fiji and Zimbabwe, but unfortunately, it will not be available in New Zealand. Many still see the price of e-readers and e-books as too high. Industry experts say e-readers are just likeother consumer appliances and need to be under $US100 and e-books under $5 to boost uptake.

Apple and Microsoft are rumoured to be working on tablet computers or readers with ebooks, and Google a universal e-book store called Google Editions: other companies in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea are developing e-readers for the mass market. Forrester Research  say 2009 is the 'berakout' year of the e-readers.

The day of the proprietary e-book reader and format could be over.

Currently there are 1,384 e-Audio books and 1,349 unique titles in the library catalogue, which can be downloaded.  We use the 'check out' model where you can access a single copy at a time.  This was for 2 weeks, but a new feature gives you the choice of 7 or 14 days.  If the item is already checked out, then a hold can be placed.  The items are downloaded to your PC and can be transferred to iPods and MP3 devices. At the end of the period the item either expires or you delete it.  Over the last year, there have been 7,218 issues. Biographies and self-help books are popular. The top 10 titles are:

• The Art of Presence
• 1st to Die
• Ask and It Is Given, Part I
• The Count of Monte Cristo                                                                                  
• Practicing the Power of Now
• 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace
• The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent, Part I
• How to Get What You Really, Really, Really, Really Want
• 101 Ways to Transform Your Life

CADAL is the Chinese-American Digital Academic Library - or Chinese-US Million Book Digital Library project. CADAL was co-constructed by Chinese and American institutes and researchers. At present it's co-managed by Zhejiang University Libraries and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Graduate School. The project was initiated by American and Chinese computer scientists, including Prof. Raj Reddy (Carnegie Mellon University), Pan Yunhe (Zhejiang University).  According to Wikipedia, there are now 1.5 million books digitised, including 150,000 English digitised volumes. About 3,000 volumes are downloaded every day. From printed books, the next phase will focus on painting, calligraphy, audio and video.

Other countries such as Taiwan, India and Egypt are also said to be involved.

This is a plain vanilla, no apparent frills site. It appears to be for the use of students at Chinese universities only but I created an account and logged in. At one stage it invites you to "sigh in" - I liked that. I searched the image file, which appears to contain about 9,000 images for 'horse' and got 200 results - this loaded quickly but i couldn't see any information about the images - where is the metadata, the enriched bibliographic information? If I clicked a tick box, the site loaded more images similar to that one - that was nice and simple, however, with this digital library, you need to know what you are looking for and what you are doing, as there's very little context to the content.

It looks more like a digital library designed by computer scientists than by librarians.

Gallica is the digital library, or bibliotheque numerique in French, for the Bibliotheque National Francais. It was established in 1997. As of August 2009, Gallica had made available on the web about:

• 120,000 scanned volumes
• 65,000 full-text volumes
• 1000 audio documents
• 110,000 images.

If you search on Katherine Mansfield, you can see there are 90 results, some fulltext journals or books - you can refine your search by author, language, publication date (by century), by provenance or origin, by theme and by access type - is it available for free or subject to some conditions - which appeared to mean the item could be purchased through an external book supplier.

There are also featured collections of:

• France in America
• Voyages en France
• Voyages en Italie
• Voyages en Afrique
• The Voltaire Library at the National Library of Russia (Catherine II, Empress of Russia, purchased Voltaire's library and letters after his death in 1778)
• Proust
• Emile Zola
• Utopia

You can also "assemble your own digital library and tag your documents" by creating your own account. This is an attractive well laid out website and digital library with great metadata and bibliographic information.

The Association of Research Libraries, the American Library Association, and the Association of College and Research Libraries have prepared The Google Books Settlement: Who Is Filing And What Are They Saying?  to summarize in a few pages of charts some key information about the hundreds of filings that have been submitted to the federal district court presiding over the Google Books litigation.

There were over 400 filings by affected class-members and 'amici curiae' friends of the court. Only about 10% appear to have supported the proposed settlement, including some who supported 'with reservations'. The bulk of filings objected to the settlement - this included the New Zealand Society of Authors saying the settlement is anti-rightsholder.

The document lists key supporters and opponents with categories such as:

• Pro-competitive - Filings in this group generally argued that the new services or works made available through the settlement would have positive effects on the market for books, digital books, and scholarly access to books.
• Pro-rightsholder - This party, a British licensing body representing several thousand authors, said the Settlement would create new opportunities for rightsholders to exploit their works.
• Pro-user - Filings in this group generally argued that the Settlement would expand access to books, especially for underserved communities such as rural areas, small colleges, and the disabled.

• Anti-competitive - Filings in this group generally argued that the Settlement would give Google an unfair advantage over competitorsin the search, bookselling, or book scanning market.
• Anti-rightsholders - Filings in this group generally argued that the Settlement would interfere with what the filers believe to be the proper scope of rights granted by copyright law, e.g. by granting Google immunity from suit for what the filers believe to be infringing activity, or by empowering the Book Rights Registry to negotiate with Google on behalf of rightsholders who do not opt out of the Settlement.
• Anti-user - Filings in this group generally argued that the Settlement would endanger the users of Google's proposed services by, e.g., providing inadequate protection for user privacy or academic freedom. There is sometimes an overlap between this group and anti-competitive arguments, as some filers worried that users would suffer due to monopolistic practices by Google or the Book Rights Registry.