userslib.com

Harper Collins Publishers just released a free book viewer.

“Try before you buy”

[Link to HC portal | found via Mashable]

All of Amazon’s Search Inside!™ books now show stats about the content of the book: the book’s 100 most frequently used words, number of words, words per sentence, “readability” (difficulty), etc.

find stats by hovering over the cover of a book that has “Search Inside!™” and choose “Concordance” or “Text Stats” | link to example

[via information aesthetics]

Just released yesterday, The Internet Archive’s Open Library project now has an extensive wiki-ish book site. Their goal is for users (anyone) to populate it with every book. Some books already have some full-text and some link to the scanned images via their old pageturner. I think this will be interesting to follow since most of the content is user-generated and I’m wondering how well this will take off. Lots of people already use LibraryThing, but thats more about making your own collection - so there’s (maybe) more incentive to tag and comment. The Open Library is about making one big collection.
Link To Open Library Beta

In light of the recent CIC announcement of a shared repository, I thought it’d be a good time to look at some of the current systems that provide access to digitized books.

Museum of Fine Arts Boston - Hopper Sketchbook

There are a few pageturners that actually animate the action of turning a page. I think they are lovely but definitely only good for special items or exhibits.

Link to example item (click “Hopper’s Sketchbook”)

Princeton University Library Digital Collections

This is definitely one of the most attractive pageturners. I like the thumbnail view, image zooming (though I think the image area could be a bit bigger), and lovely collection browse page.



Link to example item

The Future of the Book - The Iraq Study Group Report

This one’s not quite a “pageturner” because the text was likely born digital so they have the luxury of starting with great text and complete metadata. I think it’s worth mentioning because I like the annotation functionality.



Link to example item

Penn State Digital Library Collections

I pulled this one out because it has more functionality than the average pageturner. It allows you to save favorites, compare 2 pages, order saved to present in a “slideshow” etc.



Link to example item

University of Michigan - MBooks

And I couldn’t possibly leave out MBooks (disclaimer=I work on this project). The Michigan Digitization Project is currently based on the books digitized through the Google partnership but will eventually include items scanned by UM.

About the project | Link to example item

My full collection of PageTurner interfaces

Here is a feed from my delicious for all the pageturners (or pageturner-like systems) that I know about.

Do you know of any others? Please let me know.