Showing posts with label e-books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-books. Show all posts

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Federated Search Across Multiple Book Sources Including Major Online Stores with Q-Sensei

I was looking for a way to search multiple online book retailers, when I found the Q-Sensei plug-in for Firefox. It worked perfectly, and I have added a Q-Sensei search box to this blog because I like it so well.

If you are a librarian, a  book lover or someone who often needs to locate books that are difficult to find, I highly recommend that you try Q-Sensei. Better yet, if you use Firefox as your browser, install the plug-in so you can do a federated search of multiple sources with a single click from the ISBN.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Google Engineering Director Spells Out Vision for the Future of Digital Books - mediabistro.com: BayNewser


Google Engineering Director Spells Out Vision for the Future of Digital Books - mediabistro.com: BayNewser

This is quite interesting because it goes far beyond Google's plans for out-of-copyright and OOP books. I like the idea of having the book files in the cloud, but I don't see why they have to be on Google's servers. There's no reason they couldn't reside on other servers. The main idea, though, is that readers would have permanent rights to their e-books, and that they could read their books on any hardware platform. This would solve a big problem and prevent monopolistic companies from dominating the e-book market. The other good idea is that with the spread of the Espresso Book Machine and similar instant book printing devices, this model would support rather than undermine independent bookstores.

Two big questions about e-book licensing remain unanswered: can these books be re-sold and can they be bequeathed as part of an estate? I think the answer for e-books will always be negative because publishers will not want to lose control of the content or to allow a used e-book market to open up.