“Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone . . can edit. …Wikibooks has two sub-projects; Wikijunior which is aimed at children and the Cookbook which is our collection of recipes and culinary topics. Contributors maintain the property rights to their contributions, while the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GNU Free Documentation License makes sure that the submitted version and its derivative works will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.”

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The goal of Open Library is "to provide a page on the web for every book ever published. At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you're looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell's where you can purchase your own copy. Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.”

“LibriVox objective: to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project. Librivox donates its recordings to the public domain Librivox is powered by volunteers. Librivox maintains a loose and open structure Librivox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe, in all languages.”

“The mission of the International Children's Digital Library Foundation (ICDL Foundation) is to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. The Foundation pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children.”

“HathiTrust … is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than sixty partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form, preserving them securely to be accessed and used today, and in future generations.”

Mission and Goals (extract from Hathi Trust Site)

• To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a number of academic institutions.
• To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions.
• To help preserve these important human records by creating reliable and accessible electronic representations.
• To stimulate redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries, thus reducing long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of print collections.
• To create and sustain this “public good” in a way that mitigates the problem of free-riders.
• To create a technical framework that is simultaneously responsive to members through the centralized creation of functionality and sufficiently open to the creation of tools and services not created by the central organization.

The Digital Public Library of America aims to unify access to the disparate digital collections that are already in existence. The project is still in it’s beta phase and will be officially launched in April 2013.

“Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Project Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. We carry high quality ebooks: All our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers. “ The meta data for the content is freely available and can be imported into a library catalogue.

Unglueit is a crowdfunded project that aims to convert select in-copyright but no longer commercially available works into Creative Commons licensed freely available eBooks. Unglueit works with the rights holders of a work to negotiate compensation amount that is mutually acceptable. The compensation funds are then generated through crowdsourcing whereby interested institutions and individuals can pledge money.

“The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.”

The Internet Archive has also developed a new scheme for libraries called In-Library Lending (15). Any library can join this initiative for free on the proviso that they submit one book from their collection for digitisation, items can include out of print, in copyright titles. The donated copy is uploaded onto the Open Library borrower platform and library patrons who are physically at the premises of a participating library can download titles from a collection of over 200,000 items in ePub or PDF format. A client can borrow up to 5 items at a time for two weeks; titles are loaned in accordance to a one copy one loan principal. Adobe Digital Editions is used to provide digital rights management . Over 1000 libraries worldwide participate in the In-Library Lending scheme which is accessed via the Open Library site. At present only two Australian libraries are participating in this scheme: the PowerHouse Museum Research Library and Burdekin Public Library(15). Libraries subscribing to the OverDrive platform have access to 70,000 titles via a partnership with Open Library.

Further Reading:

In-Library eBook Lending Program Luanched, Internet Archive Blog, February 22, 2011.

The Google Books project is an undertaking by Google to digitise millions of books from around the world (20 million scanned thus far). Google has developed partnerships with a number of major international libraries and mainstream publishers in order to secure content. The publishers provide content on the provision that only a proportion of the work is accessible and a purchase option is provided. Google has however; run into legal issues due to the fact that the company has digitised in-copyright works without first seeking permission from the copyright holder. A settlement was reached in 2009 which offered rights-holders a percentage of the revenue, or the choice to opt out of the scheme; e.g. remove their works. The original settlement also provided US public Libraries with unrestricted on-site access to books which are no longer commercially available (p58 22). In 2011 the settlement was rejected and the parties are back in court.