E-Book currents

Citation

Falk, H. (2003), "E-Book currents", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920cae.001

E-Book currents

Howard Falk

Thousands of DSpace downloads

MIT's online archiving system, DSpace, is getting a lot of academic attention. About 2,000 institutions, libraries, and other organizations have downloaded DSpace software since its release in November 2002. A total of eight universities have now signed up to test, fine-tune and suggest improvements to DSpace. Together with MIT, the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, the University of Toronto, and the University of Washington at Seattle have formed the DSpace Federation. MIT received a $300,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to form the Federation.

European Forum for Open Archives

The Open Archives Forum aims to make digital repositories widely available and globally accessible, encourages technology sharing, and enables developing countries to obtain access to scientific and cultural information. Partners in the forum include UKOLN – University of Bath (United Kingdom), Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione – CNR (Italy) and the Computing Center of Humboldt University (Germany). UKOLN is the forum coordinator. Forum tasks include getting agreement on common terminology about digital repositories, examining metadata and full text harvesting models, bringing user and community needs to repository developers, exchanging experiences about the open archive approach, and technical validation of tools, software and interfaces. For an overview of Forum work and results thus far, see www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/dobratz/5#5

How to get copyright permissions

When Carnegie Mellon University Libraries requested permission to digitize and offer Internet access to copyrighted material, they got 22 percent positive responses. The libraries sent 278 letters to copyright holders for a random sample of items from their collections. About half the requests got a yes-or-no response. Almost one-third failed to respond and most of these were sent follow-up request letters. No copyright-holder addresses were found for about 11 percent of the sample items. Positive outcomes of the study include definition of a request procedure that brings at least some results, and development of a database of publishers (http://zeeb.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/LIT/Projects/copyright.html)

The European Library

The concept of a single, virtual European Library that will allow users to search and access from collections from participating national libraries has moved a step closer to becoming a reality. TEL, a 30-month cooperative project (www.europeanlibrary.org), involves national libraries in Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the UK, as well as the Conference of European National Librarians, to make recommendations to improve interoperability across national boundaries.

Growing Online Library at University of Massachusetts

During the past two years the library at the University of Massachusetts has spent more on electronic documents than on printed books and that trend is continuing. The library Web site (www.library.umass.edu) offers online access for students, faculty, and staff. The most popular electronic resources are online databases and journals and these receive almost 60 percent of all traffic to the library Web site. An online reference service allows students and faculty to talk to a librarian 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Professors can post course packets and outlines for their students, using an ereserves feature. Last semester, over 11,000 students used this feature. Online library users can renew and reserve books, search the library catalog, and request interlibrary loans. The library plans to add open linking which allows users, when they find a citation for a desired journal article, to click on a link and display the full article text.

Cell editor joins Public Library of Science

Vivian Siegel, Editor of the prestigious journal Cell, has moved to the Public Library of Science (PLoS) where she will be Executive Editor for their open access journals. Dr Siegel, who has a PhD in Genetics from the University of California, San Francisco, is well-known in the scientific community. Her new duties include developing and leading the PLoS editorial board and establishing the editorial structure and policy of the journals. PLoS is launching two biology and medicine journals that will be freely available on the Internet. The success of these new journals, and of numerous other journals planned by PLoS, depends on their ability to attract scientists who submit their best research for publication. Dr Siegel's excellent reputation is expected to be important in attracting these scientists.

Meanwhile, Pieter Bolman of Elsevier (the largest commercial publisher of scholarly journals) has criticized open-access journals and the Public Library of Science, using the following arguments:

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  Asking authors or their sponsors to pay the costs of dissemination might corrupt the peer-review system.

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  Open-access literature is not assured of long-term preservation.

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  If publishers did not hold the copyrights on articles, then they could not afford to digitize their back runs; the cost of seeking all the separate permissions would be prohibitive.

Advocates of open-access reply as follows:

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  Open-access journals do not call for payments until after an article is reviewed and accepted.

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  Commercial journal publishers provide for preservation only when they see market potential. Commercial publishers impose licensing terms that prevent libraries from providing long-term preservation. Open-access publishers encourage long-term preservation.

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  With open-access, authors hold their own copyrights and give all the permissions needed for preservation before publication.

Changing the rules on media restrictions

HR 107, the Digital Media Consumers Rights Act of 2003, now before the US House of Representatives, aims to allow consumers of ebooks and other digital materials to use what they purchase in ways most convenient to them in their own homes. The bill would alter present US copyright law to allow viewers to make back-up copies of DVDs for personal use and to copy songs on to hand-held listening devices. Rick Boucher (D-Va), who introduced the bill, said it is supported by The American Association of Libraries, American Association of Universities, and the American Consumers Union.

In February 2003, some technology companies, including Dell, Microsoft and Apple, pledged to oppose new bills currently before Congress that give consumers the right to make a limited number of personal copies of software under the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. In return, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has agreed to drop its support of legislation for hardware copyright protection schemes.

When the US Supreme Court ruled in January that Congress was entitled to extend all copyrights by 20 years, the majority opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg invoked the idea/expression dichotomy and fair use. The idea/expression dichotomy holds that copyright does not protect facts or ideas. It only protects specific expressions of facts or ideas. This opens the way to cite a fact or idea while criticizing copyrighted written material or while building upon that material.

Dan Jackson, a UK programmer, bought ebooks in Microsoft Reader format for use with his Casio Pocket PC, but he found that he could not view those books. Jackson says he searched the Web for solutions to his problem, made contact with the author of a program for conversion of MS Reader files, and decided to make that program available to the public. The conversion program is now available, free, on Jackson's Web site. He believes it is legal for purchasers of MS Reader ebooks to use this software to allow them to view their ebooks on alternative computers. Microsoft is said to be aware of Jackson's software and to be considering its options to respond.

Classic ebooks licensed to schools

A new licensing arrangement offers schools the right to distribute, internally, unlimited copies of ebooks from a collection of classical titles. The license, offered by Palm Digital Media, (www.palmdigitalmedia.com) covers up to 500 ebook titles such as The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Night and Day by Virginia Woolf, and the works of William Shakespeare. Collections of 250 titles for $499, or 500 titles for $750, are offered. Schools will receive the Classics Collection on a CD. If the school has a Web site, the ebooks can be listed on that site by title and author. Schools without Web sites can get a hosted service for an added fee. Users will be able to click to make their title selection and download the ebook copy in less than a minute to their own computer. Download versions will be available for Palm hand-held computers, Pocket PC devices, Mac and Windows desktop and notebook computers, and Microsoft Tablet PCs.

Ebook titles downloaded via libraries

Library patrons in northeast Ohio are being offered a new service that lets them borrow electronic versions of popular books over the Internet. The service offers an unprecedented number of titles to a very large audience. It is sponsored by the Cleveland Public Library and 30 other northern Ohio libraries. The service allows patrons to download text from library Web sites. In some cases, users can change the format of the ebooks to run on their home and hand-held computers. Borrowed ebooks automatically expire in the borrower's computer at the end of their lending period. The ebook lending system uses a series of secure codes to ensure that each copy of titles purchased by the Ohio libraries is available to only one reader at a time. The service will become available in March 2003, offering about 1,000 titles. The titles are made available through purchase agreements with ebook publishers, and access to the ebooks is managed by OverDrive (www.overdrive.com) a distributor of ebooks, digital periodicals, and other media from publishers and content suppliers.

Australian virtual reference service

Using the AskNow! Service, Australian librarians answer questions via the www.asknow.gov.au Web site. At the site, users type in their name and e-mail address, then enter their question into a text box and click on Connect. After confirming their e-mail address, users click on Continue to start interacting with a reference librarian. The dialog takes place in real time using chat software, and the service is available to anyone with Internet access. Librarians can open Web pages on users' PCs, so both user and librarian view the same pages. AskNow! is available Monday to Friday 9am-8pm Australian Eastern Summer Time (AEST), 8am-7pm AEST, 8.30am-7.30pm Australian Central Summer Time (ACST), 7.30am-6.30pm ACST and 6am-5pm Australian Western Summer Time (AWST).

Available on the Internet

Digital Book Index (www.digitalbookindex.com) is a well-designed site that allows users to download over 65,000 titles. Included are both free and for-sale ebooks from more than 1,800 publishers. Reference titles include more than 2,000 Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Thesauri, Glossaries, Bibliographies, Timelines, Chronologies, Literary Histories, and Writing and Style Guides. Reading software for the titles can be downloaded from the site. Searching and browsing are well organized, but tend to be somewhat slow. Downloads of free books can be initiated directly from the Digital Book Index site. For-sale books are accessed by linking to commercial ebook Web sites.

University of California Press books available online at its Web site (http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress) include over 350 titles available to the general public plus an added 300 titles for faculty, staff, and students only. The ebooks cover topics such as art, science, history, music, religion, natural history, and fiction. This is said to be the largest collection of University Press books available to date in electronic form. Books at the site can be read online, but there is no provision for downloading.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com), a free multilingual encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers on the Internet, has published its 100,000th article. About two-thirds of the articles are in English. Each page on the site contains a link that allows users to edit, reposition and revise material created by other writers. Once a user has made an edit, those changes are posted immediately. Users can also view older versions of a page, discuss the page, view links on a page and see related changes. Wikipedia encourages contributors to write articles without bias, represent all views fairly and to attribute controversial opinions, rather than stating them as fact. However, a sizeable number of articles have noticeable biases. Critics have pointed out that Wikipedia's contributors have varying degrees of expertise and writing ability, and the site's operations do not include fact-checking or other editorial procedures. Users are advised to proceed with caution.

Edocuments at Amazon.com

Amazon.com calls them edocs. They are items like novellas, long feature articles, how-to booklets, and niche research papers. For now, bestselling edocs at Amazon.com are about business, computers and the Internet and tend to sell below $15. But the online bookstore is trying to find edocs on consumer non-fiction, how-to topics such as woodworking, consumer inspirational, self-help, consumer health, and even some high quality fiction. Tips to edocs providers from Amazon.com include using thumbnail-size cover art that is easy to read. Reviews, book descriptions, who-should-buy advice, tables of contents, benefits for readers, and testimonials are all encouraged.

Howard Falk(howf@hotmail.com) is an Independent Consultant based in Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA.