…The father of all these e-book projects, Project Gutenberg, was founded in 1971 by American Michael Hart. The project...originally keyed in books by hand so that people could read them online for free. The project recently celebrated the creation of its 100,000th e-book....
Mr Hart, often described as the "father" of the e-book, says Project Gutenberg is all about sharing knowledge." ...
Estimating that there are a million free e-books these days available for download, Mr Hart believes the personal computer is rapidly becoming the personal library."
Just look at the new terabyte drives for under $US400 ($A459)," he says. "You could store a million e-books in one uncompressed, and perhaps 2+ million in zip drives." ...
[Bruce Preston is a former Sydney librarian who started a website on e-books] hopes the book industry is taking note of moves by Apple and music company EMI to remove copyright protection software known as Digital Rights Management from downloadable songs, a move that allows the songs to be played on a range of devices....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/21/2007 09:45:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
