Thing #15 -- Audiobooks and eBooks

The availability of audiobooks and ebooks, free and fee, online has exploded in the past few years. With the Google project to digitize entire libraries, Project Gutenberg, and others bringing public domain books to the web, we have the availability of thousands of books online. Additionally, with the movement to open source and sharing, many more books are appearing online, much to readers' delight.

Although most authors' work is protected under copyright law, many current authors and copyright holders are investigating open access options of the Internet. Neil Gaiman, for example, posted on his blog that he wanted to make one of his books available online... Free. He polled his readers and the overwhelming choice was American Gods. This book is now available, online, for one month for anyone wanting to read his book.

The publishing company Tor, long known for science fiction and fantasy books, now offers a free download of a new Science Fiction title every week -- simply for the asking. Other types of services are also appearing such as email books -- DailyLit sends books in installments via e-mail or RSS feed, free or pay-as-you-read.

Discovery Exercise:

Explore some of the audiobook and ebook download sites:

• http://librivox.org/
• Open Culture
• Quarter Share from Podiobooks
• http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/
• http://www.audible.com/
• http://www.learnoutloud.com/
• The Internet Archive -- over 220,000 online books
• ManyBooks - Free eBooks for your PDA, iPod, or eBook reader
• LibraryElf - The perfect companion to a public library system
• Public Library - 400,000 PDF ebooks for download
• WellToldTales - Free short story podcasts
• Wowio - Public domain, free legitimate copyrighted materials & one of the only with a selection of Comic Books
• Online Books Page - access to books that are freely readable over the Internet
• Gutenberg Project Top 100 - Popular books from the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet
• http://www.worldebookfair.com/

Discovery Exercise:

• Write a blog posts about two of your favorite audiobook or ebook finds and provide links.
• How are these types of sites valuable to you? ...to your library?
• How will the availability of books online affect libraries of the future? How can libraries compete with this type of availability?