MyiLibrary Introduction

We recently announced a new service called MyiLibrary that provides e-books, of which we have currently purchased about 50. This is a great way to ensure that we will always have an electronic copy of certain titles that disappear quickly and frequently (ex. computer books, study guides, job/career, health). Customers can access these titles via the Catalog and the Databases page. Each book can only be viewed by one customer at a time.

I have added an introduction page to the Technical Trainer wiki. Please click here to access the MyiLibrary page.

More on Online Books

Here is a link to a Library Journal news item about some new Google Book Search features. Again, we need to be prepared for these new services. Speculating what impact they will have on our library will make us better prepared.

Free E-Books Abound (In Other Languages, Too)

The amount of material available on the web is ever-increasing, as we all know. One area of expansion that should be of interest to librarians is the collection of free e-books.

First, we have Project Gutenberg,"... the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today." Click here for further information about this project.

You can search the Project Gutenberg catalog here. Notice that they have many titles in other languages. They have over 50 titles in Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Tagalog.

And, if you have an aggregator, you can subscribe to their RSS feed and be notified of the new books they receive (http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss).

Adobe has many classics in PDF form (of course). See their listings here (scroll down to see the classics).

The ALA Techsource Blog recently mentioned the new service, Wowio. Read about that here.

You also have Google Books in which you can perform and advanced search by Author, Title, Year, or even ISBN.