The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has published this paper on e-book circulation. The study by Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Justin Littman is called "A Circulation Analysis Of Print Books And e-Books In An Academic Research Library." The study compared the usage of books available in both print and e-book format at the Duke University Libraries. They found that e-books received 11 percent...

On March 20 Bartleby.com, a premiere source for free online literature, verse, and reference books, relaunched their Website and added five major reference works. Users can now access complete electronic versions of the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition; The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition; Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition; Simpson's Contemporary...

Within the British Library's Online Gallery exists a gem called Virtual Books. Here, readers will find a collection of great books that can be viewed online using the library's own award-winning "Turning the Pages" software. A great place to start is by scoping out the six works displayed on the landing page, which include selections from the great Indian epic, The Ramayana, draft scores of...

Since the advent of the Internet, a number of artists and related organizations have become interested in utilizing the web to promulgate new forms of artistic creation and their subsequent dissemination. Supported by the Arts Council of England, these Diffusion eBooks are essentially pdf files that readers can download, print out and make into booklets. As the site suggests, "the Diffusion format...

Fans of the Scout Report will be unsurprised to learn that this resource from the Digital Public Library of America, which we featured in June 2018, proved a crowd favorite. Open Bookshelf makes it possible for readers of all stripes to download public domain e-books on their mobile devices with no need for a library card or account login, including books in languages other than English. On June...

A project of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), EBONI's Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines is a list of baseline standards for the design of hypertext books. Created by Ruth Wilson and Monica Landoni of the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Strathclyde, UK, the guidelines were established to encourage the use of styles and techniques that have been...

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia has posted the 1896 classic of social psychology, Gustave LeBon's The Crowd. Known for his seminal considerations of crowd psychology and its impact on the French Revolution, LeBon believed in a "crowd mind" that "is not an intellectual or rational entity but a sentimental and emotional one through which irrational ideas spread as if by a...

This online series of books prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress presently contains studies of 100 countries. Each study has been prepared by a "multidisciplinary team of social scientists" and offers a textbook-like portrayal of the beliefs, values, institutions, geography, politics, and economics of each country. Texts include photographs, tables, glossaries,...

There are a number of places to get books online, but this recent addition to that cadre of websites is definitely worth a look. The staff members at Manybooks.net have adapted the e-texts created by the Project Gutenberg DVD and placed them online in a host of formats, including pdf, eReader, and as Palm document files. Visitors can begin by browsing by author, title, category, or language. Some...

While not offering new publications, this fun and handy resource does provide a glimpse into the possible future of libraries and publishing. literature.org has made available online four definitive volumes by Charles Darwin. These include The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Origin of Species - 6th Edition, and The Descent of Man.