Briefs: Another World eBook Fair, More Books Too!; Banned Books List (Google & Amazon); Library News Smart Answers
In July The World eBook Fair took place offering more than 330,000 FREE full text books, all in PDF format, all ready for downloading, bookmarking, sharing. We've learned that another World ebook Fair will take place in October. It's sponsored by The World eBook Library Consortia that offers these materials year round for a small fee.
From a news release:
5,000 new eBooks for cellphones are being added this week and this is only 1% of the hoped for 500,000 eBooks being targeted for release on the first day of October in honor of International Book Fair Month. Up from the 1/3 million eBook files offered for download, all free of charge, on July 4, in response to requests of eBook readers around the world, more eBooks were added to include more modern selections via commercial sources and a wider variety of formats, which could total 1/2 million eBooks in October. If all goes perfectly well there will be 1/2 million free eBooks, AND over 100,000 from various commercial eBook sources.
Fast Fact: Approx 30 million ebooks were downloaded during the July book fair.
Don't forget that services like NetLibrary and ebrary and others offer for FREE a few of these, along with many full text books that discuss these titles online, accessible from home or office. All you need is a library card. Actually, ebrary offers a service with over 20,000 full text books that you can read (no limit) online for free. You only pay if you print a page.
We've also noticed that some books where you could only find catalog listings on Google were searchable and viewable (in limited amounts, of course) via Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book.
Bottom Line: It would have been useful if Google would have also linked to some of these resources as well.
Here are a few examples of banned books that you can read and search on Amazon.com:
See Also: Speaking of the American Library Association, you'll now find up-to-the-minute American Libraries News at the top of Ask.com web results pages when searches include ALA or American Library Association. Of course, this is in addition to the organic (1-10 results) you're expecting. Also, a search for ALA Techsource brings the latest postings from this ALA site. Btw, a search for library news or Library Journal brings back the latest from this publication.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
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