A while ago we posted about Project Gutenberg, the eldest of the electronic text projects on the internet. But there are certainly lots of others. We have links to electronic text sites on our Books & Literature Page, focussing on free texts. SearchEngineWatch had an article last fall which pointed to resources covering both free and fee texts. One of them counts 100,000 digitized texts out there--and the Million Book Project and Google have barely started their digitization projects so far...
Some of the activity is coming from commercial publishing. A fascinating article turned up about a traditional publisher's venture into electronic books. Baen, a science fiction publisher, has been giving away some texts and making previews of other titles available very inexpensively via the Web, and has found that this practice increases their sale of printed books.
Eee, this is all so complicated and so important for us as readers and the servants of readers; it's hard to even get near it in a short blog posting. News about yet another aspect, the intersection of ebooks and digital publishing and the print-on-demand market, can be found at It's-All-Good.
PS. For an inside-academia look at the Google project, try Confessions of a Mad Librarian. For more about the Internet Archive and its Million Book Project, try this Slate article, and a detailed explanation from Carnegie-Mellon University, respectively.
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