Resources of the Week: A Never Ending "Virtual Stream" of Digitized Text
Resources of the Week: A Never Ending "Virtual Stream" of Digitized Text
by Gary Price, Senior Editior
When Chris Sherman and I were writing and then giving book talks and presentations about The Invisible Web, we said John Mark Ockerbloom's Online Books Page was an essential resource for anyone interested in digitized, full text books -- now commonly called as eBooks. More than eight years later I feel the same way about this awesome and well organized collection.
Where do you begin with a site so full of content? For me, that's easy. Monitoring the latest additions to the catalog/page. I am always blown away by the amount of new listings (when does Ockerbloom sleep?) and the number of organizations digitizing books. If you think it's only Google digitizing books (of course they are a major player) but not they're far from the only one doing this type of work. Just look for yourself. The page even has an RSS feed.
So, the Online Books Page is not only a "must have" searchable directory of ebooks but it can also be a great collection development resource to find and add digitized content to your local collection/OPAC.
But wait, we've got more.
The Online Books Page new listings only includes some of the digitized text output from the Internet Archive (IA).
If you want to be able to review (at your leisure) all of the new digitized content text content that the IA produces, it's possible by subscribing to this RSS feed. Even if you're not going to review the titles, just let it run for a few days to get some idead of the sheer quantity of text material being digitized in variety of formats. It's an understatement to say that the scanners at the IA are cranking it out on all cylinders. So, collection development types and ebook enthusiasts, subscribe to both RSS feeds and have a large virtual bookshelf to choose from each day.
UPDATE: Not an RSS user? No problem. Just visit this Internet Archive page and refresh it a few times a day. The most recent addition is at the top.
Additional "latest additions" pages at the Internet Archive:
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