#20 e-books

While browsing Amazon, I have often seen the advertisements for Kindle, but have never been interested enough to look at them. I still like the idea of a physical book rather than an electronic one.

I can see the use of e-books however, to access material that is otherwise unavailable- be it a rare item or something for a student's assignment where no copies of a text are available in the libraries. Handy to be able to store so many books in a small space too.

I searched for authors Bronte, Homer, and AB (Banjo) Paterson on Project Gutenberg and found works from all three. There was an interesting comment at the end of the publication details;

'Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook.' That would involve another search!

The list of options for downloading looked daunting, but I had a go and selected the plain text version of the 'Man from Snowy River' and was expecting complicated download screens, but instead got the text straight away. This will be excellent for library queries when people want a certain poem or excerpt of a work.

Very interesting and easy to use - must remember this one (Will save to del.icio.us!)

The free books blog would be good to investigate further but for now I think Project Gutenberg has plenty to keep me busy.

Google book search is interesting too and after reading how it worked I followed the link to 'Library Partners'. Some prominent libraries in the world are partnering with Google to digitise some of the items in their collections. Libraries are from all over the world - Japan, Spain, France, USA, and also some well-known universities like Oxford and Princeton.
New York Public Library have the books available through their websaite as well as Google. Maybe NSL could do something like this one day, or at least the National Library.

There is more to e-books than I realised!.