E-book currents

Citation

Falk, H. (2002), "E-book currents", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919jae.001

E-book currents

Howard Falk

E-book service has timed downloading

The Libwise e-book service (www.libwise.com) allows registered library patrons to download titles. After a specified time interval, each downloaded title will become unavailable for reading. Libwise is designed for use by libraries and for reading groups, corporations, churches and other groups that wish to circulate e-books and monitor their use. The service targets PDA handheld device formats, and will start by offering about 2,000 titles out of the 65,000 titles available through the Fictionwise.com site.

Libraries handle late-night online queries

A number of public libraries have begun to offer 24-hour, seven-day-per-week reference services via the Internet. For example, the Cleveland Public Library's service (www.knowitnow24x7.net) finds that 20 percent of their inquiries come in between 8:30 and 9:00p.m. A large non-profit service (www.247ref.org), based in Southern California, offers libraries software tools to set up 24-hour, seven-day-per-week reference services. The licensing fees are said to be very attractive for both small and large libraries. The service uses librarians from member libraries, plus moonlighting librarians located throughout the USA, to respond to patrons' late-night requests. The software tools are able to take control of users' computers to demonstrate methods for finding information on the Web.

Customized E-newspaper

A San Francisco Chronicle service, starting in November 2002, will allow users of its www.sfgate.com Web site to select Chronicle sections of interest and to specify the time they typically begin their commute to work and their choice of audio, text or e-book formats. Through software installed in the users' computers, selected Chronicle stories will be automatically downloaded before the users wake up each morning. Audio versions will be recorded by users' rewritable CD drives or in MP3 format. Text and e-book files will be written in PDA format. Pricing has not yet been determined.

Users can also listen to popular new items directly on the sfgate.com Web site. The Chronicle hopes that those who take advantage of these new services will become paid subscribers to the newspaper.

E-document archives

National Archives of Australia

Until last year, users who wanted to see items in the National Archives of Australia had to visit a reading room in Canberra or at one of seven other Archive locations in that country. An online database (RecordSearch) allowed users to identify Archive documents that might be of interest, but there was no online access to the actual documents. Today, users throughout Australia have online access to documents in Canberra, and will soon have online access to all archive locations.

Tests of various methods to convert Archive materials to digital files resulted in choosing low-resolution copying by overhead cameras. While certain high-use documents were chosen for conversion by the Archives staff, most of the document conversions have been made in response to user requests.

Users access the materials through the Archives Web site where they identify the document they desire using the RecordSearch database. On the document description screen, the user enters a request for a digital copy and receives an electronic acknowledgement. Production of the requested copy may take as long as 90 days. Users must keep checking the database to find out when the copies become available. The service is entirely free.

The documents are mostly 30-150 years old and the Australian Government holds the copyrights for most of the materials in the Archive. Copyright owners who object to having their documents made available to the public are asked to contact the Archive. In more than a year of operation, with over a million images published online, there have been no such contacts. E-prints at Glasgow

Scholarly work and research at the University of Glasgow is now available to the public via the Internet (http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk). The eprint service draws from an archive that includes peer-reviewed journal articles, theses, book chapters, conference papers, project reports and similar documents. The University Computing Services staff operates the computer equipment for this service, while the university Library staff takes responsibility for the content and appearance of the Web site, and for administration and promotion of the service. Future plans include linking the archive documents to catalog listings and improvement of user search capabilities. Like many e-document archives that wish to make their contents publicly available, the Glasgow e-print archive uses software compliant with the Open Architecture Initiative – OAI (www.openarchives.org). Version 2.1.1 of Eprints, free software designed to create OAI-compliant online archives, is available from the University of Southampton (http://software.eprints.org/) US e-document archives

DSpace, a digital repository for the intellectual output of MIT, is currently under development. It is a joint project of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, designed to preserve and distribute text, audio, video, images and datasets. Individual contributors and academic communities can determine who will have access to works they submit to the archive. DSpace enables remote access, reading and searching via the Internet (http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/home.html). MIT plans to open DSpace to all its professors by the end of 2002, and to make a set of software tools for creating online archives available for free downloading.

The eScholarship Repository offers University of California faculty a central location for depositing pre-publication scholarship. The Repository is sponsored by the California Digital Library (a library that serves the campuses of the University). The Repository receives documents from University research units, centers, and departments that produce working papers or pre-publication scholarship. Users who wish to access the Repository sign up with their email address and affiliation <(http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/about.html).

A "Knowledge Bank" is under development at Ohio State University, according to a report issued by a planning committee chaired by the OSU Director of Libraries. The report recommends extending digital projects already underway at OSU, which provide access to online library materials and reference tools. Envisioned additions for the OSU Knowledge Bank include "a scholarly portal, resources resulting from increased participation in digital publishing, a directory of research done by OSU faculty, and a digital repository that would archive and facilitate access to the many types of digital intellectual content being generated by units of the University".

The Caltech Library System is developing a set of digital repositories for the campus. Repositories currently in production include Computer Science technical reports, Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory technical reports, Library System papers and publications, and electronic theses and dissertations. Repositories in development include Caltech Control and Dynamical Systems technical reports, the journal Engineering & Science, Caltech oral histories, and Caltech Parallel and Distributed Systems Group documents. The contents of each of these repositories will be compliant with the Open Archives Initiative protocol, so that they can be easily accessed (http://library.caltech.edu/digital ).

The Yale Electronic Archive is a joint project of Yale University Library and Elsevier Science. After a year of planning, the project team is ready to build a small prototype archive using available software and to explore archival uses. The goal is a sustainable archive to preserve e-journals, starting with the 1,200+ Elsevier Science journals (www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/yea/).

Student complaints about e-books

Students at Ball State University in Muncie Indiana voiced some complaints about the e-book devices they were given to take a course on "Human factors, needs assessment, and user-driven design". Of the 91 students involved in the study, 40 of them used textbooks, and 51 used e-book readers supplied by Thompson Multimedia and Gemstar. With these e-books, students found that moving from page to page was tedious, and locating specific chapters and particular words was difficult. Several students felt the e-books made it difficult to absorb information. Some students switched from e-books to printed textbooks after complaining about eyestrain. However, the study demonstrated that the students who used e-books did just as well on quizzes as those who used printed textbooks.

At Des Moines Area Community College in West Des Moines, Iowa students have access to the Internet, e-books and online journals, but the campus has no library of conventional printed books. Teachers use electronic boards instead of blackboards and students can download the board contents for use as classroom notes. With these facilities, some students reported difficulty locating information about older technologies. The College put restrictions on the number of pages that can be printed when it was discovered that students preferred reading material on printouts rather than reading from computer display screens.

At Clayton College and State University in Georgia, the average age of the students is 28, and most have jobs and families. These students find it faster and more convenient to open a printed textbook than to turn on a portable computer to view an etextbook. Clayton psychology Professor, Donna McCarty, has given up her efforts to use e-textbooks and now feels that e-books do not yet provide the convenience and satisfaction that these students get from print books.

Electronic browsing for e-books

One virtue of browsing through library stacks is serendipitous discovery of related works shelved nearby. Another is the ability to get a visual measure of the scope and boundaries of works available within a given discipline. Conventional search and retrieval software currently used with online collections is very efficient for locating specific works but is not designed to provide these broader browsing functions. However, a tool called VisualNet is being used to provide graphical views of library holdings, including both printed and electronic works. The library at Belmont Abbey College in Belmont North Carolina is using this tool to present a view of its holdings (http://belmont.antarcti.ca). Use of e-books has more than doubled at this library since the tool was introduced. The library looks forward to linking this visualization tool to their OPAC, so that once works of interest have been visually located, the user can display OPAC data and search strings in popup windows.

E-book reader for cell phones

Acrobat Reader, used for viewing e-books in PDF format, is now available for use with Nokia 9290 and 9210 phones. The software, in an English language version, can be downloaded free (www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforsymbian.html). The Nokia phones are relatively expensive devices used mainly by business people in Western Europe. Versions of the software in German, Italian and Spanish are planned. By the end of 2002, many other cell phones capable of using this version of Acrobat Reader (which is compatible with the Symbian Operating system) are expected to become available in the USA and in Europe.

Further delay in copyright trial

The trial of the Russian software firm ElcomSoft for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was scheduled to begin 26 August. That date has now been moved back to 21 October. The firm is accused of selling software that lets owners of Adobe-coded e-books copy or transfer their e-books from one computing device to another. If found guilty, ElcomSoft could face a fine of $2.25 million.

Meanwhile, ElcomSoft plans to develop new e-book software products that will not violate any laws. The firm continues to sell password recovery products that work with many popular commercial software programs. The aim of these products is to allow users to recover forgotten passwords needed to activate software. Included among the ElcomSoft products are versions of a tool that can discover passwords needed to open and use secure PDF files. For example, a user may want to print from a purchased PDF e-book, but may find the print option grayed-out and unavailable. ElcomSoft products may allow this user to gain the ability to print. ElcomSoft products are available from the RegNow company, based in Issaquah, WA.

Supreme Court to hear copyright case

In October, the Eldred vs Ashcroft case will come before the US Supreme Court. The plaintiff, who posts public domain e-books online for high school students, challenges the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extends copyrights to 70 years after the originator's death. The court will consider whether Congress has the right to extend copyright law if the change does not promote the "progress of science and useful arts" as required in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.

The government claims that CTEA promotes the arts by protecting their economic value, and that the Constitution grants Congress, not the courts, the right to make judgments about copyrights. If the court overturns CTEA, this could call into question other related laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If CTEA is upheld, it will be a major setback for digital-rights advocates.

Bills to ease fair use of copyrighted works

The US House of Representatives has approved a bill that would make it easier to use copyrighted works in online classrooms. The copyright provision was included in an appropriations authorization for the Department of Justice, which passed with a vote of 400 to 4. The provision still has to pass a Senate-House conference committee, new votes in both chambers, and requires the signature of the President.

A Digital Choice and Freedom Act has been proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose. The Act would allow consumers to copy CDs, DVDs and other digital works for personal use. The same type of copying that is now permitted for TV shows and audio tapes. Passage of this Act is not expected in 2002.

New e-book sites

The Windows and .Net Magazine Web site (http://ebooks.winnetmag.com) now sells dozens of information technology ebooks from Penton and John Wiley.

OfficeMax has opened an online bookstore (www.ebooks.officemax.com) that offers thousands of Microsoft, Adobe, and Palm e-book titles. The e-books are available in a wide range of subject areas. Hundreds of business e-book titles, along with technology guides and how-to manuals form the core of the offerings.

E-book Locator (www.ebooklocator.com) is a free search tool for identifying commercially available e-book titles. Tens of thousands of titles from over 400 publishers are covered by the database at this site. Each entry provides a short description of the title contents, brief excerpts, briefer review quotes, and links to Web sites where the title can be purchased.

Howard Falk (howf@hotmail.com) is an Independent Consultant based in Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA.