The Library of Congress published a post this past week highlighting their growing collection of open access ebooks.
We are excited to share that anyone anywhere can now access a growing online collection of contemporary open access eBooks from the Library of Congress website. For example, you can now directly access books such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and Youjeong Oh’s Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place from the Library of Congress website. All of these books have been made broadly available online in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, which chose to publish these works under open access licenses.
A key objective of the Library of Congress digital collecting plan is the development and implementation of an acquisitions program for openly available content. We have previously discussed a number of open access book projects, including open access Latin American books, and open access children’s books. Significantly, the Library of Congress has long been receiving print copies of open access books through multiple routine acquisition streams. These openly licensed works can be made much more broadly accessible in their digital form.
In addition to the LOC's collection, there are numerous free ebook sites such as Project Gutenberg, the major ebook retailers all have free ebook sections, and a lot of creators have released some of their works for free. This includes textbooks and other curricula that have been released for free as Open Educational Resources.
image by Pierre Blaché via Flickr
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