Curl up with a good eBook

Be careful as you come out of your local supermarket. Drop your receipt in the street, and the chances are that someone will digitise it and bung it on the Internet. It’s not cheap to digitise material which was previously only available in print - you either need a charitable handout, or you need subscribers to share the costs. Let’s have a look (in reverse order) at one of each of these.

Searching for the sausages

Gale Virtual Reference Library is paid for by subscription. In our case, Westminster Libraries have coughed up the dosh, and library cardholders get the service by using a library computer, or by entering their card numbers elsewhere.

It covers a wide range of subjects (well, they include Arts, Biography, Business, Education, Environment, History, Information & Publishing, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Religion, Science, and Social Science, since you ask). But it isn’t a database, with all the stuff in one virtual pile on the Gale server.

It is just over 120 eBooks, each of which has been digitised and added to the library. Each eBook has a publication date, and its contents will remain constant until a new edition is substituted. With me so far? Good. Well here’s the clever bit: even though they’re individual volumes, you can search them all together. So when I put in my usual test search word, "sausages", I am offered entries from the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, the Writers Directory and Countries and Their Cultures.

Then, if I like the look of Countries and Their Cultures, for instance, I can browse it by going back to the home page. It’s rather clunky: I am faced with a list of subjects with +s by them. But if I can’t guess where my target eBook is hiding, I can click "show all" to reveal the whole list of volumes in the library. Then I can go exploring.

Gale Virtual Reference Library needs a bit of work on the Welcome Mat, but once you’re inside it’s a library well worth spending time in.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Quick reference". Gale Virtual Reference Library is under "Dictionary and encyclopaedias".)

Thanks a hundred million

Project Gutenberg is an example of the Fairy Godmother school of web publishing. A chap called Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 worth of computer time by the University of Illinois. If that isn’t being in the right place at the right time, my name’s not Santa Claus.

Michael decided that digitising out-of-copyright books and making them freely available was the best way to spend his windfall. As you can imagine, the subsequent story is long and complicated, and if you like you can read about it in an account rather longer than some of the books!

What we need to know immediately is that there are over 20,000 eBooks in the collection, with another 80,000 available through partners and affiliates. You can spend days exploring the treasure trove of texts, or you can use the search box to find the one you want.

If it’s there, you will usually be offered a variety of delivery methods. You can view an HTML or plain text version on your screen (or print it off if you have enough paper and strong arms), or you can download an electronic version which works on some of those little handheld devices – Palm organisers, smartphones, and so on.

Good work Michael. I imagine the University are satisfied that their computer time was well spent.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Books", then select "Online books" for Project Gutenberg.)

Picture credit: johnsense/morguefile.com