Library Web Chic

So Many Free E-books So Little Time

Ever since I added the University of California Press free e-books to
SFX I've been wondering how many other freely available e-books are out
there. The answer is tons. There is Project Gutenberg, World eBook Library, eBooks@Adelaide, and The Digital Book Index. The Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library
has a good list of freely available e-texts if you want to find more.
The problem is how does a library try to provide access to all these
texts in a unified and coherent way. In my mind one good way to do this
is through an OpenURL resolver. However, what I've found is that few of
these sites that have free ebooks are targets in OpenURL resolvers. One
could create targets for these texts if there was a consistent way to
link to them. One challenge I have faced in this process is that our
current OpenURL resolver (SFX) only allows us to add a list of items to
a target by ISSN or ISBN. Supposedly the next version of SFX will allow
more flexibility, which would be help. Another challenge I've
encountered is getting a list of ISBNs and URLs for the free ebooks
available from a site. Typically such information is not readily
available. Although some sites ,in particular Project Gutenberg, have
been very willing to discuss the topic and attempt to provide
assistance. Overall, the experience has been very positive. Although I
wish that it was easier to set some of these sites up as targets.