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