The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has released Libraries, Patrons, and E-books .

Here's an excerpt:

Some 12% of Americans ages 16 and older who read e-books say they have borrowed an e-book from a library in the past year. . . .

But most in the broader public, not just e-book readers, are generally not aware they can borrow e-books from libraries. We asked all those ages 16 and older if they know whether they can borrow e-books from their library and 62% said they did not know if their library offered that service. Some 22% say they know that their library does lend out e-books, and 14% say they know their library does not lend out e-books.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Association of American University Presses has released Digital Book Publishing in the AAUP Community Survey Report: Spring 2012

Here's an excerpt:

In addition to gathering data about e-book revenue, digital marketing and discovery strategies, and format and channel availability, we also asked respondents to share their opinions about major concerns or hurdles they are facing, and to tell us more about their presses' e-book goals.

| Digital Scholarship |

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek has released EPUB for Archival Preservation.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the last few years, the EPUB format has become increasingly popular in the consumer market. A number of publishers have indicated their wish to use EPUB for supplying their electronic publications to the KB. In response to this, the KB's Departments of Collection and Collection Care requested an initial study to investigate the suitability of the format for archival preservation. The main questions were:

• What are the main characteristics of EPUB?
• What functionality does EPUB provide, and is this sufficient for representing e.g. content with sophisticated layout and typography requirements?
• How well is the EPUB supported by software tools that are used in (pre-)ingest workflows?
• How suitable is EPUB for archival preservation? What are the main risks?

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |

Unglue.it has launched.

Here's an excerpt from the Frequently Asked Questions:

Unglue.it is a place for individuals and institutions to join together to give their favorite ebooks to the world. We work with rights holders to decide on fair compensation for releasing a free, legal edition of their already-published books, under Creative Commons licensing. Then everyone pledges toward that sum. When the threshold is reached (and not before), we collect the pledged funds and we pay the rights holders. They issue an unglued digital edition; you're free to read and share it, with everyone, on the device of your choice, worldwide.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography| Digital Scholarship |

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has released The Rise of E-reading.

Here's an excerpt:

One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks. In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Nicholas W. Jankowski, Andrea Scharnhorst, Clifford Tatum, and Zuotian Tatum have self-archived "Enhancing Scholarly Publications: Developing Hybrid Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Enhancing publications has a long history but is gaining acceleration as authors and publishers explore electronic tablets as devices for dissemination and presentation. Enhancement of scholarly publications, in contrast, more often takes place in a Web environment and is coupled with presentation of supplementary materials related to research. The approach to enhancing scholarly publications presented in this article goes a step further and involves the interlinking of the "objects" of a document: datasets, supplementary materials, secondary analyses, and post-publication interventions. This approach connects the user-centricity of Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web. It aims at facilitating long-term content structure through standardized formats intended to improve interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains. We explored this conception of enhancement on a small set of books prepared for traditional academic publishers. While the project was primarily an exercise in development, the conclusion section of the article reflects on areas where conceptual and empirical studies could be initiated to complement this new direction in scholarly publishing.

For related information, see the SURF Enhancing Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences project website.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 80 | Digital Scholarship |

Nathan Rinne has self-archived "Teaching with Google Books: Research, Copyright, and Data Mining" in E-LIS.

Here's an excerpt:

Google's Google Books site is a rich resource that is probably underutilized by most educators. It has all kinds of potential for a) getting students into the research process in a way that they will enjoy (for example, they can see how a famous quote has been used/quoted, find out which books cite the journal article they are interested in, or check to see if a specific book covers a topic that they want to explore, etc.); b) teaching them about the deeper civic purpose and the evolving state of copyright law; and, c) exploring, with the help of Google Book's Ngram viewer, the promise and ethics surrounding the issue of data-mining and "non-consumptive" research, or research that is accomplished by "mining" books for data, as opposed to reading them.

| Google Books Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

The Authors Guild has filed a motion for partial judgment on the pleadings in the Authors Guild et al. v. Hathitrust et al. case.

Here's an excerpt from the associated "Memorandum of Law in Support of Plaintiffs' Motion for Partial Judgment on the Pleadings":

Defendants are wildly exceeding the special privileges Congress granted to libraries under Section 108 by systematically digitizing, reproducing, distributing and putting at risk millions of works through their mass book digitization program. Defendants' so-called orphan works program is similarly inimical to the Copyright Act, as it violates Section 108(h)'s explicit limitation of libraries' use of orphan works to the twenty year period preceding the end of their copyright term. Neither fair use under Section 107, nor any other statutory exception under the Copyright Act, can justify Defendants' systematic and concerted digitization, reproduction, distribution and other unauthorized uses of millions of copyright-protected library books. Accordingly, Plaintiffs urge the Court to grant their motion for partial judgment on the pleadings.

Read more about it at "GBS: Authors Guild Goes for an Early Knockout," "Guild Motion Asks for Quick Ruling on HathiTrust's Fair Use Defense," and "A Masterpiece of Misdirection."

| Digital Bibliographies | Digital Scholarship |

Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and other scholars have sent a letter ("Academic Author Objections to Plaintiff's Motion for Class Certification") to US District Court Judge Denny Chin about class certification issues in the Authors Guild v. Google Case.

Here's an excerpt:

We believe that our works of scholarship are more typical of the contents of research library collections than works of the three named plaintiffs in this case. Betty Miles is the author of numerous children's books. Jim Bouton is a former baseball pitcher who has written both fiction and nonfiction books based on his experiences as a baseball player. Joseph Goulden is a professional writer who has written a number of nonfiction books on a variety of subjects, including a book about "superlawyers." None of these three are academic authors. Their books are aimed at a popular, rather than an academic, audience. As professional writers, their motivations and interests in having their books published would understandably be different, and likely more commercial, than those of academic scholars. Hence, our concern is that these three do not share the academic interests that are typical of authors of books in research library collections. As we explain further below, the clearest indication that the named plaintiffs do not share the same priorities typical of academic authors is their insistence on pursuing this litigation.

| Google Books Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Max Kaiser has published "Putting 600,000 Books Online: the Large-Scale Digitisation Partnership between the Austrian National Library and Google" in the latest issue of LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

In a public-private partnership with Google, the Austrian National Library is digitising its historical book holdings. Some 600,000 volumes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries will be digitised and made available free of charge. The project demonstrates that public-private partnerships can be successful in enabling our heritage institutions to provide large-scale access to their holdings, provided that such partnerships are not exclusive and free access is ensured. The article outlines the preparatory phase and work flows established in the project.

| Google Books Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Tina Chrzastowski has self-archived "Assessing the Value of Ebooks to Academic Libraries and Users" in IDEALS.

Here's an excerpt:

In 2010, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library agreed to take part in a global study of Elsevier electronic books (ebooks) sponsored by Elsevier Publishing. Ultimately, 129 UIUC faculty and graduate students participated in a logbook study that examined the ebook discovery process, detailed the way in which this group of researchers used ebooks, and queried users on the value they assigned to Elsevier ebooks. Going beyond the Elsevier survey, this study examines the value of ebooks both to UIUC users and to libraries, and it reports on an assessment of the ebook collection at UIUC including cost and use statistics. The results show that UIUC users assigned a high value to Elsevier ebooks for research purposes; this paper also determines that, in the broadest sense and as a collective format, ebooks offer libraries a better economic value than print books (pbooks) when comparing the cost of activities such as processing, circulation, storage and preservation.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has released Tablet and E-book Reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period.

Here's an excerpt:

The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital Bibliographies | Digital Scholarship |