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New York’s renowned Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has digitized a bunch of its out-of-print publications and made them available on its website–for free! Many of the books are exhibition catalogs from the ’50s and ’60s, but there are several fairly recent publications as well. The books can be accessed in multiple formats via the Internet [...]

Epicurious and TasteBook have both digitized Random House cookbooks.  Cooks who already have an Epicurious recipe box may add to it through seventy-five digitized cookbooks.  The cookbooks are copied so they appear exactly as they look in hard copy.  Books cost from $10 to $25 dollars and may be previewed before purchase.  Once purchased they [...]

Credo Reference has a number of publisher collections which feature the titles from an individual publisher.  They are available for purchase or subscription in Credo, but are generally not part of the Credo General Reference collection.  Credo just announced a new collection from Marshall Cavendish – 9 titles/70 volumes.  Here is more from the press [...]

RUSA/CODES Reference Publishing Discussion Forum: Life after the Statistical Abstract. What will the proposed demise of the Statistical Abstract mean for reference librarians and library users?  Now in its 130th annual edition, Statistical Abstract has played a central role in guiding users to statistics since before we were born.   Since finding statistics can be challenging [...]

Last year, EBSCO jumped into the e-book pool by acquiring NetLibrary from OCLC. In her Off the Shelf column in the January 1, 2011 issue of Booklist, Sue Polanka reported that although EBSCO  was starting out with a one-book, one-user model, they were negotiating with publishers to gain additional rights for multiuser, loan/lease, and subscription [...]

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has expanded its collection of e-books to more than 200 titles. GPO and Google formed a partnership in 2010 to convert Government publications into e-book format and make them available to the public through Google’s eBookstore. For example, a recent addition, the first volume of the Public Papers of the [...]

It was a little over a year ago that OCLC announced it was selling NetLibrary to EBSCO.  Last month, EBSCO released the preview of eBooks on EBSCOhost®. EBSCOhost libraries will be able to access the preview site through the Try New Features link on EBSCOhost while NetLibrary users will see a banner with the link on [...]

A year after acquiring NetLibrary, EBSCO has released the preview of eBooks on EBSCOhost. EBSCOhost libraries will be able to access the preview site through the Try New Features link on EBSCOhost while NetLibrary users will see a banner with the link on the NetLibrary interface.  Feedback will be collected using a survey that will [...]

Infobase Publishing announced new enhanced features for their eBook platform.  They include: Fulltext search option New eBook viewer design HTML default format for eBooks Improved relevancy and highlighting of search terms in context New eBook navigation tools New user tools like search history, bookmarks, notes and highlighting Additional information on Infobase eBook content (from their [...]

Proquest announced yesterday the acquisition of ebrary.  From their press release:  ”ProQuest has acquired acclaimed e-book pioneer ebrary, setting the stage for significant acceleration of the process of serious research.  The agreement will marry both companies’ inventive, user-centric technologies and add a growing pool of a quarter-million e-books to ProQuest’s monumental content offerings.  The combined [...]

A message from JSTOR about forthcoming University Press eBooks. For the past 6 months, we have been working closely with 8 university presses as well as librarians and faculty to consider whether we can make a valuable and impactful contribution to the academic community by helping to bring scholarly books online. We believe we can. [...]

I’ve been considering whether to ask Santa for an e-book reader for Christmas. Everyone I know who has a Kindle loves it, but I’d prefer to download books from my local library, even knowing the selection is limited and the downloading process is a nuisance, because 1) I want to support my library and 2) [...]

Springer is launching a new product line SpringerBriefs. Featuring cutting-edge research and practical applications in compact volumes of between 50 and 125 pages, SpringerBriefs will be available as eBooks and in print. SpringerBriefs will cover a wide range of content from professional to academic across a variety of subject areas including business and economics, computer [...]

ebrary® announced that it has collaborated with librarians and publishers to develop a new patron driven acquisition (PDA) model.  With ebrary’s implementation of PDA, libraries may create collections of titles of their choice, provide full access to end-users, and have titles automatically added to their permanent collection in real-time based on usage. Key features and [...]

Gale released a college version of the Access My Library iPhone app.  Using a college email address, students can gain access to Gale resources using their mobile device.  The public library version, which was released a while back, offers apple and android apps, the school library and college versions are for apple products only right [...]

Credo Reference is adding a Publisher Collection from Ashgate. Fifteen comprehensive, specialty titles will soon be available on the Credo Reference platform. Ashgate publishes over 60 reference titles annually in humanities and social sciences. The titles to be available through Credo Reference are representative of the cutting edge research for which the company is known. [...]

Scott Wasinger, the Senior Director of Sales for eBooks and eAudiobooks for NetLibrary, chatted with Sue Polanka last week for the No Shelf Required blog.  The discussion included details on how EBSCO is implementing the NetLibrary content into the existing EBSCOhost interface, what changes we can expect to see with the classic Netlibrary interface, new [...]

As regular Points of Reference and Reference Books Bulletin readers know, POR blogger Sue Polanka also writes No Shelf Required, a blog about e-books. Now she shares her expertise in a more traditional format–her book No Shelf Required: E-Books in Libraries was recently published by ALA Editions. In it, a wide range of contributors offer chapters on [...]

ebrary®, a leading provider of digital content products and technologies, today announced that its flagship subscription e-book database, Academic Complete, now exceeds 50,000 titles from the world’s leading publishers.  Academic Complete continues to be the largest multidisciplinary e-book database licensed to libraries throughout the world, under a simultaneous, multi-user access model with continual growth.  Furthermore, [...]

The Curriki blog has a nice post highlighting 10 sources for free textbooks online.  In addition to Curriki’s own site, they link to bookboon, flatworld knowledge, ck 12, open culture, Project Gutenberg, and others.  Several of these support open source textbooks.  If you are not familiar with open source textbooks, feel free to take a [...]