Classic children’s books for FREE! What can be better? The Billion eBook Gift campaign’s intent is that, “every child has access to a choice of books to read regardless of the device they prefer to use.” This exciting campaign supports Reading is Fundamental (RIF), well recognized and supported by literacy supporters. Put simply, these are free books in the hands of caring adults and children ages 0-8 years old. A few of the 50 titles each child receives include Goldilocks, The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood – all available in both English and Spanish. It’s as simple as an email address, name, and password and kids are on their way to free books! If you have additional questions, visit their FAQ page to get started.
Have you heard the big news? Penguin Random House announced December 3 that it will implement perpetual access for all of its eBook titles and cap prices per title. The new structure will phase out the Penguin model of one-year lending and reduce the price for some previous Random House titles with a $65 cap on all Penguin Random House e-titles starting January 1. Sounds good until you compare this cap with what a consumer pays for eBooks and print titles. This is progress, but is this as good as we can expect in library land?
Ebooks Minnesota will offer every resident of our state an easy-to-access collection of children’s, young adult, and adult ebooks on a wide variety of subjects. We are proud to say this collection will be Minnesota-made, with books from our state’s thriving independent publishers. The collection will highlight some of the best of Minnesota’s literary and non-fiction works and provide a strong and diverse set of ebooks to support school and public libraries as they work with readers of all ages.
State Library Services is using LSTA funds to co-fund the project with Minitex.
When you think about eBooks do you think of a book or software? Software!?!
That’s the idea behind Benjamin Denckla’s editorial on Publishing Perspectives about the need for a version 2.0 of eBooks. “Software has bugs that need to be fixed,” he argues, and “Software needs to evolve as its environment changes.”
In particular his discussion centers around eBook conversions, taking a book a publisher owns and converting it to eBook format. Denckla argues that those early, cheap, low-quality book conversions were needed to fill the market, but now publishers “should do a high-quality second conversion.”
The discussion is interesting and well worth the read!
Image credit: http://gratisography.com/, licensed under CC0 1.0
Nate Hoffelder of Ink, Bits, & Pixels has shared news about a new startup program, eBooksAreForever. In his post, Hoffelder points out the problems libraries can face when it comes to eBooks: the “annual fees, expiring licenses, and mysterious technical glitches.” That’s where J. A. Konrath comes in.
Around this time last year he and August Wainwright launched eBooksAreForever, a startup that offers a library-friendly ebook solution. Based on the idea that it’s more important to get ebooks into libraries than make a buck off of them, eBooksAreForever sells DRM-free ebooks under a ‘forever’ license. . .
Sounds exciting! You can read more and join in the conversation here.
