E-books

Mark S. ZinzowFebruary 12, 2014http://slideshare.net/msz

E-book Defined

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-bookAn electronic book (variously: e-book, eBook, e-Book, ebook, digital book, or even e-edition) is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on computers or other electronic devices.

Topics

Why E-books?

Sources to Obtain
or Read E-books

E-book Software/Apps

Legal Terms & Issues

Safety & Piracy

Project Gutenberg
History & How you can help promote E-books

Why E-books?

Paper books are bulky, heavy,
expensive, and not as ubiquitous as the Internet.

You can carry many more e-books when traveling.

You can search e-books for quotes, or analyze them with software.

Free ebooks can be reproduced and shared at negligable cost and effort, providing knowledge or entertainment to potentially millions of people.

Eco-friendly Save a Tree!

Democratic free e-books are available to anyone with Internet Access.

E-books can be more accessible via braile or text to speech.

Sources to Obtain E-books

Collections

Search Engines

Publishers

Libraries

Universities
Open Education

Collections

Internet Archive

Project Gutenberg

Librivox free audiobooks

WikiBooks

The World Public Library Association

Amazon's list of Free eBook Collections

Calibre Free Library

Search Engines

Books.google.com

http://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/

Smashwords - Crowd Sourced DRM-free E-books

http://rapidlibrary.biz/ (Unsafe?)

http://inkmesh.com/free-ebooks/ (stale)

BookBub Email Example

Search operators: e.g. Filetype:ppt|pdf (not epub)

Scholar.Google.Com

Books.Google.Com

Google Custom Search

Google Ebooks Search Engine

DRM Free Publishers

O'REILLY

Baen Books

https://www.google.com/search?q=drm+free+publishers

http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/10/list-of-drm-free-publishers/

(Note: These are both FREE E-books!)

Libraries

Monroe County (NY) Library System (local)

Open Library - Over 1 million free titles! Many scanned books unavailable elsewhere

EBook Lending Libraries

List of Libraries that offer non-resident cards

BiblioTech - first U.S. public digital library

Most libraries use either the OverDrive Media Console or Adobe Digital Editions software for DRM.

Universites/Open Education

Open.edu

openstaxcollege.org

TextbookRevolution.org

BookBoon.com

MIT OpenCourseWare

U. of M. Open Textbook Library

Many more... (search for Free Textbooks)

E-book Software/Apps

FBReader - free multi-platform e-book reader supporting popular e-book formats like ePub, fb2, mobi, html, plain text, and a lot more.

Calibre - free multi-platform e-book reader, organizer/database, format converter, editor

http://lifehacker.com/5509965/how-can-i-convert-pdfs-and-other-ebooks-to-the-epub-format

Legal Terms & Issues

DRM Digital Rights Management = Copy Protection

DMCA Digital Millennium Copyright Act Robots generating take down requests with about 37% unjustified.

Price Fixing / Antitrust - Attorneys General and Class E-book Settlements - https://ebooksagsettlements.com/

http://www.techurls.com/news/136849

Commercial e-books are licensed, not sold! http://toc.oreilly.com/2012/12/ebook-lending-vs-ownership.html

Piracy & Safety

You can steal commercial e-books with torrents, from Usenet, TOR archives, or file sharing sites, but ...

You may get Malware such as a Virus or Trojan Horse.

Your ISP (Internet Provider, e.g. TWC, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc.) will impose penalties under the Copyright Alert System (CAS)
a.k.a. Six Strikes.

You could be subject to
lawsuits and criminal penalties.

Project Gutenberg

How you can help
create E-books Distributed Proofreaders Self-Publishing Portalwww.petascale.org/presentations/googlepg-presentation.pptMany sites redistribute PG material in different ways like: http://manybooks.net/