DigitalPreservationEurope has released its Digital Preservation Video Training Course, a series of digital videos recorded at the DPE/Planets/CASPAR/nestor Joint Training Event: Starting out: Preserving Digital Objects-Principles and Practice in October 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the course page:

The training introduces participants to a number of key digital preservation principles. Participants will leave with:

• an awareness and understanding of key digital preservation issues and challenges,
• an appreciation of the range of roles and responsibilities involved with digital preservation activity,
• knowledge about the reference model for Open Archival Information System (OAIS),
• a familiarity with file formats currently considered beneficial for preservation,
• a developed understanding of the role and use of metadata and representation information,
• knowledge of the preservation planning process and its benefits to overall digital preservation strategies,
• an insight into the concepts of trust and trustworthiness in the context of digital preservation,
• a working knowledge of the issues surrounding audit methodologies and self-certification of digital repositories.

The Creative Commons has released CC0 1.0 Universal, the "no rights reserved" license.

Here's an excerpt from the CC0 FAQ:

Are CC0 and CC's Public Domain Dedication and Certification ("PDDC") the same?

No. PDDC was intended to serve two purposes—to allow copyright holders to "dedicate" a work to the public domain, and to allow people to "certify" a work as being in the public domain. Our experience with PDDC shows that having a single tool performing both of these functions can be confusing.

CC0 is a single purpose tool, designed to take on the dedication function PDDC has been performing, but in a more complete and legally robust way. CC0 is universal in its applicability, intended for use world-wide by anyone anywhere holding copyright or database interests in a work. PDDC is based on U.S. law, and the enforceability of its dedication function outside of the U.S. is not certain.

Read more about it at "CC0: Waiving Copyrights" and "Want to Waive Copyright? Creative Commons Has a Tool for You."

The British Library has released iPRES 2008: Proceedings of The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects: Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation, The British Library, London. 29–30 September.

Here's an excerpt:

This volume brings together the proceedings of iPRES 2008, the Fifth International Conference on Digital Preservation, held at The British Library on 29-30 September, 2008. From its beginnings five years ago, iPRES has retained its strong international flavour. This year, it brings together over 250 participants from 33 countries and four continents. iPRES has become a major international forum for the exchange of ideas and practice in Digital Preservation. . . .

The iPRES 2008 conference theme and the papers gathered together here represent a major shift in the state-of-the-art. For the first time, this progress enabled the Programme Committee to establish two distinct tracks. The practitioner track is designed for those with an interest in practically preserving digital content within their organisation. The technical track is designed for those with an interest in underpinning concepts and digital preservation technology. Readers will find valuable insights to draw from in both areas.

Jill Hurst-Wahl, digitization consultant and author of the Digitization 101 blog, has released the Digitization 101 Resource List.

Although it will have a recommended price of £14.99, Faber will let readers decide what to pay, including nothing, in order to download a digital copy of Ben Wilson's What Price Liberty?.

Read more about it at "Faber Launches 'Pay-What-You-Want' Ebook'" and "'Pay What You Want' Ebook from Faber."

The University of Rochester has released version alpha 0.1 of its new open source institutional repository system, IR Plus. A test version of the system is available, and a discussion group has been established on Google.

Here are the documentation links:

• Quick overview
• Installation manual
• Administration manual
• User manual

Library Journal has published "Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box" by Andrew Richard Albanese.

Here's an excerpt:

If [Clifford] Lynch is "queasy," it's because he questions whether institutions—in particular, libraries—are biting off more than they can chew and swallow by conflating IRs with an alternative publishing mission. "I think it is short-sighted. I know many of these institutions are feeling great pain from pressure on their acquisition budgets and would like to mitigate that," he says. "But that's a short-term economic thing, and I'm sorry to see it getting mixed up with IRs."

As part of a thematic issue on open access, The Journal of Electronic Publishing has published a paper by John Willinsky titled "Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press."

Here's the abstract:

This paper reviews and addresses the critical issues currently confronting monograph publishing as a matter of reduced opportunities for scholars to pursue book-length projects. In response, it proposes an alternative approach to monograph publishing based on a modular design for an online system that would foster, manage, and publish monographs in digital and print forms using open source software developments, drawn from journal publishing, and social networking technologies that might contribute to not only to the sustainability of monograph publishing but to the quality of the resulting books.

The American Council of Learned Societies has released ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences.

Here's an excerpt:

In 2008, ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB)—a subscription-based online collection of over 2,200 digital titles in the humanities—undertook an experiment to investigate the possibility of a future mass conversion of e-books preexisting in a scanned, page-image format into XML-encoded files. . . .

HEB had 20 sample page-image titles from its backlist converted to XML, using OCR-derived text files that had been created during the initial scanning process to enable searching. The books were tagged using a simplified version of HEB's standard specifications, to reduce the need for editorial intervention. . . . The cost of creating the XML titles was considerably greater than that associated with scanning (about $400 versus $170 per title).

The XML books were presented in the HEB collection side by side with their page-image counterparts. Despite any conversion-related flaws, our subsequent user survey indicated that readers preferred the XML format by a margin of about two to one, the most relevant factors cited in this regard being readability, accessible text, and additional features and functions not available in the page-image version.

Thomas H. Allen, former Democratic six-term House of Representatives member from Maine, has been named President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"In this age of rapidly changing technology, we must not lose sight of the abiding importance of the written word to our culture, society and our democratic institutions," Mr. Allen said. "AAP advocates on issues of paramount importance ranging from free speech and education to the protection of intellectual property rights and international freedom to publish. I am excited about tackling the challenges of this new position and its responsibilities to the publishing industry and the reading public."

Wolters Kluwer's subscription and other non-cyclical revenues were 2,441 million euros in 2008, up 3% from 2007.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

While market contractions were felt in all geographies, the company benefited from a resilient portfolio with a majority of revenue streams derived from subscription and other non-cyclical products, driven by legislative change, medical discoveries, and the increasing productivity needs of the professionals the company serves. Two thirds of revenues are subscription based with improving retention rates. The balance of the portfolio is comprised of transactional products including books, mortgage and corporate lending-based products, advertising and promotional services, and training. It is in these transactional areas that Wolters Kluwer experienced the pressure of the economic slow down.

Amazon will let publishers determine whether their e-books can be read aloud by the Kindle on a title-by-title basis.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.

As reported previously, the Authors Guild was opposed to an unbridled read aloud Kindle capability. Here's an excerpt from "The Engadget Interview: Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild."

[Aiken] Well, the legal objections fall in a couple categories. One is the basic copyright objection which I know has been bandied about a lot online, and that objection comes in two parts. There's the unauthorized reproduction of the work which is one claim under copyright law—for that there has to be fixation of the copy and there's a legal question as to whether or not there's adequate fixation in the Kindle. The second claim is that text-to-speech creates a derivative work, and under most theories of copyright law, there doesn't have to be fixation for there to be a derivative work created.

Amazon's decision has been controversial. For example,here's an excerpt from Lawrence Lessig's "Caving into Bullies (Aka, Here We Go Again)":

We had this battle before. In 2001, Adobe released e-book technology that gave rights holders (including publishers of public domain books) the ability to control whether the Adobe e-book reader read the book aloud. The story got famous when it was shown that one of its public domain works—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—was marked to forbid the book to be read aloud. . . .

But the bigger trend here is much more troubling: Innovative technology company (Amazon (Kindle 2), Google (Google Books)) releases new innovative way to access or use content; so-called "representatives" of rights owners, Corleone-like, baselessly insist on a cut; innovative technology company settles with baseless demanders, and we're all arguably worse off.

We're worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn't given them—the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me—users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google Books, because (in ways not clear when the settlement was first reported) the consequence of the class action mechanism may well disable users and innovators from doing what fair use plainly entitled Google to do.