e-books

Lots More E-Books!

In my last post about the availability of the 2010 Springer E-Book collection, I outlined some of the advantages of e-books over the print — 24/7 multi-user access, support for distance users, powerful and granular searching, suitability for reserve, and more. To expand our e-book offerings, we’ve now leased access to a core collection of over 50,000 e-books from the past several years — a collection called Academic Complete and hosted on the ebrary e-book site. We’re providing this collection on a trial basis this year to see how well the titles are used and to gather feedback from you. The Academic Complete collection is multidisciplinary, covering a variety of subject areas in the humanities, social sciences, business, medicine, and science, and offers a large number of titles from leading academic publishers. Over half of the collection dates from 2004 and later. Special features include: * Powerful searching across all of the e-books or all e-books in specific discipline areas * Complete full-text searching, including indexes and tables of contents * Ability to navigate directly to your highlighted search results within a title * Ability to browse through a book, or to navigate via the table of contents or index * Ability to browse titles by discipline and drill down to specific subject areas * Automatic generation of citations and persistent links to titles, chapters, and individual pages * Ability to add highlighting and notes to text and save in your personal online bookshelf * Convenient printing and copying * Easy export of information to EndNote or RefWorks citation managers * Text-to-speech and other accessibility features You can go directly to the ebrary site to search or browse this collection. You’ll also find the individual titles listed in NuCat. By the way, on the main search or advanced search screens in NuCat, did you know that you can now limit searches to e-books only? Instead of “View Entire Collection,” simply select “Ebooks.” I hope you enjoy using our new e-book collection. Your comments are welcome and important to us; you can comment on this post, contact your subject librarian, or you can reach me any time at a.aaron@neu.edu.

Kaplan Providing Free E-book Downloads through January 17

Want free test prep books for your e-reader? Head over to Kaplan to download your choice from 130 e-books from now through January 17th. They are yours to keep and will not expire! E-readers supported include Kindle, Nook, iPad, iTouch, iPhone, and Sony eReader.

E-books Making It Harder to Meet (and Judge) People?

I just read an interesting piece in the online magazine Slate in which the author is lamenting the rise of e-books for a very specific reason: he thinks it will make it harder to meet people and form impressions of them or get to know them because we can’t see what they’re reading. Check out the article. The author, Mark Oppenheimer, notes that he enjoys looking around on the subway to see what books people are reading, and that he has learned more about people he was dating by observing the books on their shelves. If everyone on the train is carrying a Kindle or a Nook, and books on apartment shelves vanish in favor of an iPad on the coffee table, he fears, we’ll lose out on one of the best conversation-starters around. What do you think? Is this an unforeseen drawback to the e-book revolution? Or is Oppenheimer worrying too much?

E-books? How about FREE-Books?!

If the phrase “digital library” makes you think only of Snell’s e-journals and online research databases, think again. This digital library will blow your mind. Project Gutenberg is a digital library that has 33,000 e-books, but here’s the catch–you can download them all for free. And trust me, they’re good books, too. Alice in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities… You’ve heard of them. These are just the first few titles I skim over as I access the library home page. But how do they do this for free? It just makes no sense. It’s almost too good to be true. Almost. Most of these books are available on Project Gutenberg because their copyrights have expired and are now essentially public works. So yeah, there won’t be any brand new bestsellers such as The Girl Who Played With Fire, but there are many thousands of timeless novels to get lost in. Every book is available in formats accessible regardless of your technologies abilities (mostly plain text or html). You and your laptop are about to become best friends. A nearly endless supply of free books. It’s just what your summer needs. Hey, they even have Moby Dick available on Project Gutenberg… I think someone should tell damong. Check it out! Now! www.gutenberg.org

Why haven’t portables caught on yet?

See this NY Times story about the importance of hardware usability.  It’s not enough to digitize books — you need hardware that’s as cheap and long-lasting as the printed page.