Nine “Beta Sprint” Proposals To Be Featured at Digital Public Library of America Meeting
The steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has invited the creators of nine project proposals to present their work at the DPLA’s upcoming plenary meeting, scheduled for October 21 in Washington, DC (which LJ will be attending and covering).
The proposals were submitted as part of the DPLA’s “beta sprint,” first announced in May, in which the committee asked for ideas to be submitted “that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”
The projects were selected out of 38 final submissions, and their authors include many familiar institutions from the library world—from the Library of Congress to HathiTrust to the Harvard Library Lab.
Here’s a list of the six main projects to be presented and their descriptions from the DPLA announcement:
Digital Collaboration for America’s National Collections: The Digital Collaboration demonstrates the ability of three disparate, major national institutions to work together through one unified search tool. Submitted by the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.
DLF/DCC: DPLA Beta Sprint: The DLF/DCC Beta Sprint project serves as a search tool for the DCC’s collection of cultural and scientific heritage resources, presenting unique ways of organizing and presenting materials and metadata. Submitted by CLIR: Digital Library Federation and the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, School of Information, Science and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship.
extraMUROS: extraMUROS proposes to shape the Digital Public Library of America into a multimedia-library-without-walls through an open source, HTML5 platform. Submitted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Harvard Library Lab, and Media And Place (MAP) Productions.
Government Publications: Enhanced Access and Discovery through Open Linked Data and Crowdsourcing: The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (or CIC) has been leading a coordinated effort to digitize government documents. The project continues with an approximate target of digitizing a total of 1+ million print documents. Submitted by the University of Minnesota, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, and HathiTrust.
Metadata Interoperability Services: Metadata Interoperability Services (MINT) is a web-based platform that enables the aggregation of rich and diverse cultural heritage content and metadata. Submitted by MINT at the National Technical University of Athens.
ShelfLife and LibraryCloud: ShelfLife is intended to provide users with a rich environment for exploring the combined content of the DPLA, discovering new works, and engaging more deeply with them via social interactions. LibraryCloud is the backend metadata server that supports ShelfLife. Submitted by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and multiple partners. [See previous LJ coverage of these two projects here.]
The creators of three more projects (Bookworm from the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, the DPLA Collection Achievements & Profiles System from North Carolina State University Libraries, and WikiCite) will also be featured at the meeting, during an additional “lightning round” of presentations.
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Library Copyright Alliance Releases Statement on Authors Guild-HathiTrust Lawsuit
The Library Copyright Alliance, which includes the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of College & Research Libraries, released a statement [PDF] today on the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild and others against the HathiTrust digital repository and five universities.
Here is the statement, in full:
We are deeply disappointed by the Authors Guild’s decision to file a lawsuit, Authors Guild, Inc. et al. v. HathiTrust et al., against HathiTrust and its research library partners. The case has no merit, and completely disregards the rights of libraries and their users under the law, especially fair use. The HathiTrust and its partners have assembled an unprecedented digital resource that will ensure secure, long-term preservation of nearly 10 million volumes held in member library collections. The majority of these works are not available commercially and will disappear completely if not for library stewardship. We applaud the modest steps HathiTrust and its partners have taken to foster those “orphan” works whose owners have abandoned them to library care. The HathiTrust adds significant value to library collections in support of teaching, research, and learning, while respecting the law. It is deplorable that eight authors and three special interest groups are trying to dismantle this invaluable resource out of a misplaced fear of the digital future. We are confident the court will not look kindly on this shortsighted and ill-conceived lawsuit. Authors Guild President Scott Turow wrote earlier this year, “I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.” It is a shame that the Authors Guild fails to understand what Mr. Turow expressed so well, the vital role that libraries play in our cultural ecosystem.
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WSJ: Amazon To Roll Out Netflix-like Ebook Lending Service?
According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday sourcing “people familiar with the matter,” Amazon, maker of the Kindle ereader, is currently in talks with publishers about a potential Netflix-like model for ebooks. Via the model subscribers could access a “digital-book library” of ebooks as part of a $79 annual Amazon Prime membership.
According to unnamed sources for the article, Amazon is planning to create an accessible catalog of “older titles” for the program, with a limit on the number of ebooks that members would be able to read each month using the service. Publishers are being offered a “substantial fee” to take part, according to sources, but whether any have signed on so far remains “unclear.”
On LJ’s Facebook page, readers have reacted to the news.
“This is disturbing. So many publishers have been so narrow minded the last few years,” wrote Jessica Moyer.
“I am a big user of our downloadable audio and ebooks through our library,” wrote Heather Gibson Turiello. “It’s a free resource today. Why would I pay to access library books?”
As LJ reported in April, Amazon is planning to unveil ebook library lending functionality for the Kindle later this year to integrate with pre-existing OverDrive ebook library catalogs. The Kindle is currently the only major dedicated ereader without library lending capability.
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Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader Adds Complexity to a Quickly Shifting Market
The same day that Apple and five of the Big Six publishers were sued for allegedly conspiring to fix ebook prices, Amazon unveiled further ebook news. Yesterday, it launched its Kindle Cloud Reader, a browser-based application that allows users to buy and read Kindle ebooks on the cloud via a web browser. It also lets users download books for offline viewing.
The browser-based approach is a slight departure from device-specific apps that users are most familiar with. Formerly, iPad users that wanted to read their Kindle ebooks on the device had to use a Kindle app specific to the iPad. But due to recent Apple rule changes, Amazon could not sell ebooks directly through that app. That is, users could read their ebooks, but couldn’t buy more without leaving the app.
The Kindle Cloud Reader gets around the rule by bypassing Apple’s app ecosystem entirely. It does so by displaying ebooks in web browsers, which work across many different devices. Users can read and buy ebooks directly through their browser.
For now the Kindle Cloud Reader can run on any device with either a Chrome or Safari browser (including the iPad). Versions for other browsers, including Firefox and Internet Explorer, will be available “in the coming months,” according to Amazon’s announcement.
It’s an interesting development, and could expand the audience for Kindle ebooks—although it’s unknown how the Kindle Cloud Reader will interact with OverDrive’s forthcoming Kindle ebook library lending functionality, due later this year.
Using a browser to read ebooks, of course, is hardly a new idea. Indeed, last October—shortly after Amazon unveiled an early beta version of what would become the Kindle Cloud Reader—the Internet Archive hosted a conference called “Books in Browsers 2010: The Future of Reading on the Web,” which included demonstrations of several browser-based ereaders and applications.
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EBSCO Publishing Integrates 300K Ebooks and Audiobooks Into EBSCOhost
Yesterday EBSCO Publishing announced that its collection of more than 300,000 ebook and audiobook titles were now available via EBSCOhost. All are former titles of NetLibrary, which EBSCO acquired from OCLC in March 2010.
In the announcement, the company said that it would be unveiling new acquisition models—including short-term leases, subscriptions, and expanded patron-driven acquisition (PDA)—later this year.
LJ’s Michael Kelley wrote in detail about the EBSCO ebook and audiobook integration in March 2011, when the company began previewing the unified platform.
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Iriver Ereader To Feature Google eBookstore Integration
The iriver Story HD, the first ereader to be integrated with the Google eBooks platform, will be going on sale this weekend (initially only at Target department stores and Target.com) on July 17.
The ereader will allow wi-fi search and purchase of any of the nearly three million ebooks in the Google eBookstore, and will support EPUB, PDF, FB2, and DJVU formats, among others. It will also support ebook files that use Adobe digital rights management (DRM)—likely making it compatible with DRM ebooks from OverDrive and other library ebook lending services, although that has yet to be confirmed. (OverDrive recently announced that it was making about 2500 DRM-free ebooks available.)
Early reviews of the Story HD are mixed, though the ereader’s high-definition E Ink screen has been singled out for praise. However, it lacks the social-networking and annotation functionality that leading ereaders, such as the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook, already have—at least for now. Such features could eventually appear in software updates.
That said, the Story HD’s price ($139.99) is competitive, and any product associated with the Google powerhouse could be a contender. (Just look at the company’s recent entry into the social-networking arena, Google+, which already boasts millions of users after just a few weeks.)
Expect to see early-adopter patrons with Story HD ereaders soon. And expect more gadgets to come: in a recent Bloomberg interview, Sony Electronics VP Phil Lubell said the company was planning to roll out an upgraded version of its Sony Reader—possibly as early as August.
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