Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ World eBook Fair Free Public Access

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I'm intrigued by this announcement of a 3-million ebook library that is far from perfect but has distracted me most of the day. Following an email from Gerry McKiernan I followed this blog post to the world ebook fair, a site collecting works from various open archives (such as Gutenberg and Internet Archive) and elsewhere. It's free (and apparently all-you-can-eat) for a month, $8.95 for the rest of the year. As I said, far from perfect. But, you know, these rates approach what it would cost me to store what I would want to read from the library on my own hard drive at home. If the site were better designed (and literate - come on people, look up how to use it's if you're going to use it on your home page) I might be more inclined to part with a few dollars for easy access to an endless library. Maybe. Until we brought in a proper free version (because at these rates it would cost $300 million to make this available to all Canadians, which is beyond the pale, really).

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 12:19 p.m.

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