From Klaus Graf, via Open Access News, The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden has digitized more than 656 books in their collection about Aceh, in several languages (Indonesian, French, Dutch, etc). Their website, Aceh Books. This is exciting news for me, since I have found it very hard to [...]

I’ve long been fascinated by book scanning projects, and written before about OpenLibrary and Universal Library, as well as Google Books. However, as neat as these projects are, we shouldn’t forget sites like Project Gutenberg, which have been around for much longer. Project Gutenberg relies on volunteers to scan, OCR and proof-read texts that have [...]

Background
Back in May 2007, when I attended the World Book Day in Jakarta, I heard about plans to purchase the copyrights for school textbooks, and make the books freely available, to alleviate the problem of students who could not afford to purchase them. I thought it was a very interesting idea, but hoped that they [...]

I love seeing material in multiple languages, even languages I don’t understand. As populations have become more diverse around the world, public libraries have risen to the challenge, and whether you visit the Public Library in Oslo, or in Toronto, they have wonderful collections of children and adult books (and often films, DVDs, magazines and [...]

I’ve been interested in e-book readers for a long time, and a good friend generously agreed to lend me his Bokeen Cybook v3 reader for a week or two to play with, since that is the only way you can really get a feel for this technology – just looking at it for a few [...]

The article below was written for the IFLA Section of Libraries for Children and Young Adults Newsletter, December 2008 (just published), edited by Singaporean librarian Ivan Chew, whose blog I have been reading for a long time, and whom I was lucky enough to meet in Singapore in 2007, while getting a new visa for [...]

The OpenLibrary
I wrote about the OpenLibrary previously, and since then they have only gotten better. They have added a lot of books, but more importantly, their website has turned into a real portal, where you can access all of their scanned books (over 234,000). This is only part of their quest, which is also to [...]

There are many different milestones when learning a new language. They are important to measure ones progress, especially important since often I am learning independently, and don’t have the crutch of thinking – if I passed the test successfully, then my studies must be on track. But equally or more importantly, they provide a great [...]

I absolutely love Chinese bookstores. They are often huge, and buzzing with activity. The biggest are often called “book cities”, and the one I visited in Shenzhen a year ago was about six huge floors. On the Sunday that I visited it, it was packed with people, sitting on everywhere voraciously reading. A big difference [...]

One incredibly progressive feature of the American constitution, is that it provides that everything produced by the government immediately enters public domain. I think this makes complete sense, and there is a slow movement among other countries to follow up, but it is something that should have happened a long time ago. Due to this [...]