Library Stuff

Inside Google Books – “I’m excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places.”

CNN – “Today’s Internet is governed by the idea that crowds of people can create the news, share information and collaborate on online projects. So when Wikipedia, the user-written encyclopedia that’s built an empire on this ideal, decided this week to add a layer of oversight to its system, the Web erupted in debate.”

Drool

OCLC – “OCLC today announced four new agreements have been signed with European national libraries and affiliated institutions which significantly increase the coverage of records in WorldCat and the visibility of libraries in WorldCat.org in the Europe and Middle East regions.”

Wired.com – “The federal court system doesn’t seem to like Harlan Yu and his fellow merry pranksters who made a tool to free court documents from an unwieldy computer system that has a nasty habit of charging 8 cents a page for public documents. In fact, the court system’s IT managers is warning that their browser plug-in might put sealed court documents at risk, when in actuality, the system doesn’t work at all when lawyers are uploading documents.”