The Hugo Awards 2011 - Stream em directo da cerimónia

  Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, has announced on their Hugo Ceremonies page that they plan to provide live streaming-video coverage of the 2011 Hugo Awards ceremony. This is in addition to the live text-based coverage that we’ll be providing through CoverItLive and announcements on Twitter.

The Hugo Awards Ceremony is scheduled for 8 PM Pacific Daylight Time on Saturday, August 20.

The Public Domain Review

  The public domain is a vast commons of material that everyone is free to enjoy, share and build upon without restriction. All works eventually enter the public domain – from classic works of art, music and literature, to abandoned drafts, tentative plans, and overlooked fragments.

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

By providing a curated collection of exotic scraps and marvellous rarities and linking to freely distributable copies of works in online archives and from far flung corners of the web, we hope to encourage readers to further utilise and explore public domain works by themselves.

We believe the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which – like our natural environment and our physical heritage – deserves to be explicitly recognised, protected and appreciated.

Foi recentemente inaugurado o website The Public Domain Review, que tem como objectivo a divulgação de materiais que se inserem no domínio público. Serão divulgados trabalhos de diversas áreas, desde a fotografia à literatura, sendo cada um acompanhado por um artigo de modo a contextualizar os mesmos.

Exposição Virtual - Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the image of a literary family

  Few families enjoy such a remarkable reputation for their contribution to the literature and intellectual life of Britain as the Godwins and the Shelleys. Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family explores how the reputation of this great literary family was shaped by the selective release of documents and manuscripts into the public domain. It also provides a fascinating insight into the real lives of a family that was blessed with genius but marred by tragedy.

A exposição, inicialmente realizada na Bodleian Library, encontra-se agora disponível online. A visita virtual permite explorar, entre outros elementos, biografias, manuscritos e uma árvore genealógica da família Shelley. O vídeo de apresentação pode ser visualizado abaixo:

Leituras Digitais (7 a 13 de Agosto)

Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros digitais.

Will print and ebook publishers ultimately be doing the same books?

  We could evolve so that the skills and organizational requirements to publish narrative content, if print becomes a small component of the revenue, will be quite different from what’s required to publish the illustrated content for which print remains an important part of the revenue. In that world, what constitutes a sensible portfolio of offerings for what we today call a “book publisher” might be defined quite differently.

The Guardian launches e-book series

  The Guardian has launched Guardian Shorts, a series of e-books based on its journalism. The series will feature topical news articles in several different subject areas such as sport, public policy and cultural events, with the first one entitled Phone Hacking: How the Guardian Broke the Story, which provides a “comprehensive account” of how the scandal unfolded.

  The e-books are all in English and cost between £1.99 and £3.99 depending on the subject, length and how much new content they contain and are available on the Kindle internationally and via the iBooks store. Some of the ‘shorts’ will also be available for free.

Amazon Quietly Launched a Kindle Social Network

  Twitter is a buzz Sunday night with the news that Amazon had added social networking features to the Kindle support site at kindle.amazon.com. Kindle users can now create a profile page, follow other Kindle users, share details about their reading habits, and so on.

All Eyes on Amazon Publishing

  For many agents, along with some booksellers, the real concern about Amazon Publishing has to do with what it could signal for traditional publishers. If Amazon lands enough bestselling authors, it could dominate traditional publishing the way it has come to monopolize online bookselling. Jeff McCord, owner of the Atlanta shop Bound to Be Read Books, thinks Amazon has long “wished to take over the book industry from top to bottom” and its recent foray into publishing is proof. “Amazon Publishing is a bigger worry for publishers than for bookstores,” he said.

1,000+ classic sci-fi and fantasy works to be epublished in September

  Early last month, publisher Gollancz announced that it was going to publish a new third edition of the “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” online, and make it free for anyone to access. An executive for Gollancz told FutureBook that it had profit-minded reasons for doing this, but wouldn’t explain them at the time.

Here’s why: Gollancz is also acquiring the ebook rights to thousands of out-of-print sci-fi and fantasy classics, and will start offering them for sale this fall. The launch list includes over a thousand titles, and the publisher plans to have around 5,000 titles available by 2014.

Google avança com a digitalização na Europa

  Tal como havia prometido quando lançou o Google eBooks - a livraria digital que já se chamou Google Editions e foi lançada nos Estados Unidos em Dezembro -, o Google vai lançar na Europa a sua livraria digital. Será até ao final do ano, foi confirmado ao PÚBLICO.

  A empresa não quis divulgar ainda em que países e em que moldes isso irá acontecer. No entanto, o The New York Times noticiou este domingo, que o Google eBooks abrirá uma versão francesa ainda este ano. Se, nos Estados Unidos, continua a ser discutido em tribunal o projecto de digitalização de livros do Google, em França, um dos países europeus que mais batalharam para proteger os direitos dos seus autores e editores, a empresa norte-americana conseguiu avançar.

Kindle Cloud Reader now available for Chrome, Safari, iPad

  This morning saw the launch of Amazon response to Apple in-app purchase rules.

Kindle Cloud Reader is a Chrome and Safari friendly web app where you can read and (more importantly) buy Kindle ebooks. It doesn’t work on the iPhone yet, but if you download Chrome or Safari you can try it on your PC.

Hardback sales plummeting in age of the ebook

  Dramatic falls in hardback sales are turning the triumph of the ebook into a defeat for paper publishing, with readers in their thousands opting for electronic editions rather than expensive, dust-jacketed copies of the latest fiction titles.

  Sales of adult fiction in hardback so far this year have fallen by over 10% according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan: by this point last year, sales of the format had reached £29.7m, while this year they stand at £26.6m. Cheaper paperback sales, in contrast, have only fallen 6%. Hardback sales have fallen in volume as well as value, BookScan said, from 2.8m copies sold by this point last year to 2.6m this, echoing a trend over the last two years: 8.5m copies of adult fiction hardbacks were sold in total in 2009, compared to just 7m in 2010.

"Game of Thrones" Author talks about Dwarves, Dragons and Delving into eBooks

  It was an epic geekfest that could only be matched by the likes of a Comic-Con or a Star Trek convention: Googlers flocked to hear master fantasy writer George R. R. Martin talk at our Mountain View headquarters last month, in the first-ever live-streamed event for the Authors@Google series. Though you may have missed Martin live -- in which the Game of Thrones author took a variety of questions from Googlers as well as the general public -- you can now watch the recorded talk on YouTube.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the August 21, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending August 6, 2011.

E-Book Fiction

1.                      THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett

2.                      UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY, by J. A. Jance

3.                      NOW YOU SEE HER, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

4.                      COLD VENGEANCE, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

5.                      THE BLACK ECHO, by Michael Connelly

Complete List »

E-Book Nonfiction

1.                      A STOLEN LIFE, by Jaycee Dugard

2.                      HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

3.                      UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand

4.                      IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, by Erik Larson

5.                      BOSSYPANTS, by Tina Fey

Complete List »

Vídeos

Interview with Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins

Europeana Libraries highlights

Project Muse lança novo website

A versão beta do novo website do Project MUSE já se encontra online. O comunicado oficial:

  Project MUSE has released a beta web site previewing its combined digital book and journal content. The beta site, http://beta.muse.jhu.edu, will be available through the end of this year, allowing scholars, librarians, and students to become familiar with the newly enhanced platform before the changeover to accommodate MUSE's forthcoming eBook Collections on January 1, 2012.

The beta site showcases Project MUSE's sophisticated new cross-content, faceted search functionality, and allows browsing of books and journals side-by-side. A powerful new hierarchical subject structure permits users to drill down to the most relevant content, and encourages discovery. Over 300 digital books, from 27 publishers, are available for free sample access on the site during the beta period. The MUSE collections launching in January will encompass over 12,000 book titles from the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC), a collaborative of more than 65 major university presses and related scholarly publishers. The beta site is still in active development, with many additional features planned for inclusion prior to January.

Project MUSE’s beta site also includes the complete content from the nearly 500 distinguished scholarly journals now available on the current MUSE site. Visitors to the beta site will have access to the same content for which they have rights on the current site, via their institutional affiliation and associated subscriptions. New easy-to-follow icons clearly distinguish content which is available in full text to the user, a free sample or open access, or restricted.

The new search functionality on the beta site provides a search box on every page, with an option for the user to search both books and journals or choose just one content type. Once search results are returned, facets allow for further filtering the results by research area, author, language, and content type, and to only material for which the user has full text access. Search results may include journal articles or book chapters, with multiple results from a single book title rolled up into a single cumulative entry. Efforts are ongoing to optimize the search function to return the most relevant results with the best possible speed.

Browsing of book and journal content is available by title, publisher, and research area. MUSE is implementing a new hierarchical structure of academic research areas, promoting discovery of pertinent content while moving from a broad survey through to specific sub-disciplines. With over 12,000 books anticipated for inclusion in MUSE's initial ebook collections, the new structure will provide a powerfully efficient path to the most needed material.

At the individual book level, users can browse chapter-level snippets and view pertinent details about each title. A "Search Inside This Book" feature allows for discovery within the book content without leaving the title's main page. Breadcrumbs leading back to the hierarchical research areas provide paths to related books and journals.

Many features are still in development on Project MUSE's new site and will be released over the next few months. The following will be available by the formal site launch on January 1, 2012, for both books and journal articles: enhanced Related Content links; improved saving, viewing, and exporting of citations; content-integrated "More by this Author" links; and emailing, bookmarking, and sharing capabilities. Support for OpenURL functionality and Shibboleth authentication will also be in place by January 1.

Project MUSE eBook Collections will provide libraries, researchers, and students access to a wealth of high quality book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's essential electronic journal collections in a user-friendly environment with rich discovery features. MUSE books will be released electronically simultaneous with print publication, in PDF format, searchable and retrievable to the chapter level. Frontlist, backlist, interdisciplinary, and subject-specific collections will be available for purchase, with perpetual access rights, unlimited simultaneous usage of book content, no DRM and no restrictions on printing or downloading. COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, as well as free MARC records, will be available for books on MUSE. Details on available collections, purchase options, and prices will be announced no later than October 1, 2011. The new, integrated Project MUSE web site, including book collections, will be live on January 1, 2012. More details are available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ebooks.

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide.

Ler Mais Ler Melhor: Vida e Obra de Agustina Bessa Luís