Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 318.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 20:24:58 +0100
From: Matthew Sweegan Gibson <msg2d@etext.lib.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Press Release: UVA ships over 600,000 XML ebooks for
Microsoft Reader
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Just a note on what we've been doing of late at the Electronic Text Center
in which I thought Humanist would take an interest....
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UVA SHIPS OVER 600,000 XML EBOOKS FOR MICROSOFT READER
Contact: David Seaman, director of the Etext Center at (804) 924-3230 or
e-mail: dms8f@virginia.edu
October 2, 2000 - From the Bible and Shakespeare to Jane Austen and Jules
Verne, the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center (Etext
Center) is making more than 1,200 of its 50,000 online texts available as
free e-books that may be downloaded from the World Wide Web and read using
free Microsoft Reader software. With over 600,000 downloads since the
project was launched in August, the Etext Center is the largest and
busiest public e-book library in the world, library officials said.
The Microsoft Reader software may be installed on a desktop or laptop
computer, or on a Pocket PC hand-held computer. The software displays the
electronic text on a computer screen so that it resembles the pages of a
traditional book. "The goal is to read pages on the computer screen for
extended periods of time, rather than to print them out," said David
Seaman, director of the Etext Center at the University of Virginia
Library.
The e-books are available free of charge at
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/ and titles are added regularly.
E-books currently available include the Bible, all of Shakespeare, and
classics from Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Shelley, Darwin, and Jane Austen. The collection also includes American
fiction and history from Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Twain, Melville,
Stowe, Hawthorne and Poe; early science fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Jules Verne, and others; writings from Native American and
African-American authors; and illustrated children's classics. "Aesop's
Fables" alone has been downloaded more than 4,000 times, Seaman said.
Readers from more than 100 countries have downloaded e-books from the
Etext Center. "The use of our e-books is truly global, with users coming
not only from North America, but also from Europe, New Zealand, Australia,
and even a good many from Asia, Africa, and the Russian Federation. The
enormous popularity of our e-book holdings does much to validate the
concept of the e-book software as a reading environment," said Seaman. The
audience is broad, including high school and college students, teachers,
parents, and the general reading public.
"We see e-books as another way for the library to enhance educational
opportunities and research experiences," said Martha Blodgett, associate
University librarian for information technology. Users can download
numerous texts onto one computer, giving them access through one device
rather than carrying many books. E-books are convenient for researchers,
who can perform keyword searches in less time than it takes to flip
through a paper book looking for a certain word or passage, she said.
E-books also retain some of the best features of paper books. Users can
write notes on a page and even "dog-ear" pages. "This is a new and
evolving technology and we are excited about the opportunity to experiment
with it," she said.
All of the University's e-book offerings are also available on the Web as
part of a much larger multi-language collection produced by the University
Library's Etext Center. Currently, the entire Etext Center Web site is
accessed some 90,000 times a day by approximately 25,000 users. The Etext
Center, founded in 1992, was the first electronic center of its kind and
provides Internet access to humanities-related XML texts. For more
information, visit the center's Web site at
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/
Reporters: For more information about the Etext Center or the e-books,
contact David Seaman, Chris Ruotolo, or Matt Gibson at (804) 924-3230 or
etext@virginia.edu
________________________________________________________
Again, for any questions or responses please contact me, Chris Ruotolo,
or David Seaman
yours,
Matthew Gibson
Matthew Gibson
msg2d@virginia.edu
Assistant Director,
Electronic Text Center
The University of Virginia
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