The Bookserver
This rave review from if:book and thismore cautious notice from my colleague Roy Tennant in RLG programs both address the news from the Internet Archive about the Bookserver project. (I knew i had to decline the invitation for last night’s celebration, but i have a sense of wistful regret reading these posts.)
If you’re interested about digital books, challenges to the Amazon and Google Books for-profit, commercial directions, you should read those posts and read up more on the Bookserver. (You might want to read a little bit about the final plenary at this year’s JCDL2008 as well.)
For my own personal interest and that of Kindle-bearing colleagues:
Michael Ang of IA then demonstrated how a title in the Internet Archive which was available in the MOBI format could be downloaded to a Kindle – from outside the Kindle store – and then read on the Kindle. Because many of these titles were in the Mobi format as well, Kindle readers everywhere also have access to IA’s vast database.
I’ve looked at this bookserver catalog search that Roy provided: only one out of the first fifty was in mobi format. The search doesn’t appear to allow limiting by format. Presumably, it will mature.
A side note: gah, i wish Stanza dealt with PDF better. I’ve tried Stanza a few times (months and months apart) to port PDF’s to a format i can read on my Palm Treo and have been disappointed.
May 7th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
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