Reading in the dark - The state of the ebook
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
|
10:22 am
[Link] |
The state of the ebook
A post
http://followthereader.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/the-day-it-all-changed/
about Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Founder and Chief Librarian, and his
“BookServer” project
http://www.archive.org/bookserver
Notable quotes:
1.
block quote start
• Next he announced that not only were these files available in ePub form, but that they were available in the “Daisy” format as well. Daisy is the format
used to create Braille and Text to Speech software interpretations of the work.
block quote end
and
2.
block quote start
• Next up, Mike McCabe of IA, came up and demonstrated how files in the Daisy format could be downloaded to a PC then downloaded to a device from Humana,
specifically designed for the reading impaired. The device used Text-to-speech technology to deliver the content, but what was most amazing about this
device was the unprecedented ease at which a sight impaired person could navigate around a book, moving from chapter to chapter, or to specific pages in
the text.
• Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries
fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned
by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The
last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of
information the “dead zone” of publishing. Many of these are the orphan titles that we’ve heard so much about related to the Google Book Settlement –
where no one even knows how to contact the copyright holder.
block quote end
Tags: daisy, free ebooks, online libraries
|
|
