In 1985 when Gary Kildall, IBM’s first choice before Bill Gates to design their PC’s operating system a few years earlier, came out with the first electronic encyclopedia, who would figure it would be only a quarter of a century before print encyclopedias faded from the limelight to join vinyl records and dinosaurs?
$999 would buy you an external Sony CD drive and Grolier’s CD– pretty much the same price as the paper encyclopedias, but with the option of putting any number of CDs in the drive.
This was only a year after the famous “1984” Super Bowl ad that ran only once and changed Super Bowl ads forever.
It’s all over for those hefty paper encyclopedias.
No less an authority than The New York Times tells us it is time to “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias,” that it is all over other than rolling out the last few editions of some last few hard-boiled Luddites who insist on paper encyclopedias, at a price that could easily buy you a decent used car.
$1500 would buy you an encyclopedia when I was a kid, and that’s not so much less than we paid for our first brand new $2100 car.
Obviously this pricing has taken a beating to remain competitive with electronic resources, as I just clicked on an ad for a 2007 Britannica, there doesn’t seem to be a 2008, and got three kinds labeled as follows:
I recently updated my Future History: Spacefaring Societies, Resources and Logistics essay, that expands on the Afterwords and References chapters in my e-novel ‘The Universe–or Nothing.’ The novel (2006) is archived in the Project Gutenberg Library Archive Foundation (PGLAF) from where it may be freely downloaded at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18257
We’ve just posted the 100th eBook. It’s from 1904, seems not to have been reprinted, and is a very interesting account of Toronto’s legal establishment in the 19th century: it’s a rather spectacular addition to the collection. Here’s the description from the website:
2008/03/25: As our 100th eBook, we’ve chosen this beautifully illustrated history of Toronto’s lawyers and judiciary – A true rarity and a delight to read, packed with anecdotes. You may end up thinking that the history of Toronto is the history of its lawyers!
Many of us dream of a universal digital library freely available on the web, i.e. available anywhere and at any time. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and others, we are getting there, at least for the books from public domain. The process began a while ago with a few pioneers – It is running at full speed now. We still need to see copyright issues worked out in order to provide free access to as many works as possible. We still need large scale knowledge-building projects to get reliable reference, scholarly and educational content. We still need better quality OCR technology and in the future, go back to the original image files to provide a higher quality book. We still need more efforts, there are currently 25 million books belonging to the public domain and as of mid-2007, just over 2 million freely available on the internet.
Las líneas que siguen están dedicadas a todos los voluntarios del Proyecto Gutenberg en los cinco continentes. Gracias a ellos, más de 20.000 clásicos de la literatura mundial ya están disponibles en la red, en una versión gratuita y de gran calidad, con una previsión de una biblioteca de un millón de libros.
En 1971, Michael Hart creó el Proyecto Gutenberg con el objetivo de difundir gratuitamente bajo forma electrónica las obras literarias que pertenecían al dominio público. Hasta hoy, nadie consiguió obrar con más éxito para poner los clásicos de la literatura mundial a disposición de todos. Ni tampoco crear con tan pocos gastos una red tan inmensa de voluntarios en el mundo entero, sin derroche de competencias y de energía.
With reference to this Times Online article, it seems that the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader are to be made available in the UK sometime over the next few months — it’s about bloody time!
…the launch of two rival devices due to come on sale in Britain over the next few months – Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle.
Although I already have my own Sony Reader, which I purchased while still working on the cruise ships out of Florida, I’m hoping this will mean I can start to purchase books for it from the Connect store. At present I have to settle for public domain books (PG, manybooks.net, etc) or download PDF’s from eBooks.com.
After all these years of saying free eBooks were anathema to the Olde Boye Networke of the publishing world….
The publishers are finally realizing that when eBooks are given away free of charge actually increase paper sales–not that there weren’t any number of academic studies and articles saying this from the very beginning.
So, if any Project Gutenberg volunteers ever needed kinds of vindication, it doesn’t get much better than this…at least until we find there are more eBook going out for consumption than paper books….
Michael Hart mailed a ‘Top Listing’ for the various eBook languages posted to the Project Gutenberg archives, with the totals for each language included.
As to be expected, English comes in at the top, French a clear second with over one thousand eBooks posted to the archives. With the great number of Chinese texts posted in the later part of 2007, China is now in joint 6th place with Portugal having 195 eBooks each.
A Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan — and Counting
Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.
Most of the scanning has been done as part of the library’s controversial deal with Google. The search giant is working with dozens of major libraries around the world to scan the full text of books to add to its index. But Michigan is one of the only institutions to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright.
Michael Hart mailed a ‘Top Listing’ for the various eBook languages posted to the