The British Library holds some of the most precious books in the world and you can see some of them online.   These include a lot of Britain’s most valuable documents such as the Magna Carta and Shakespeare’s manuscripts to name a few.

But they also have a fantastic “turning the pages” section (which you need Macromedia Shockwave for) where you can use your computer mouse to simulate turning the pages of the books.   The books included in this section include Jane Austen’s early work, the first European atlas, Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbook, Mozart’s musical diary (which you can have play back to you if you click on a musical score!) and also the original Alice by Lewis Carroll.

Each book has a magnifying feature so you can see the words bigger, a feature where the words are typed if you can’t make out a word and an audio feature where the words are read back to you.

It’s truly remarkable and breathtaking how much work and effort has been put into the British Library website and how much work is constantly being put into bringing these wonderful treasures into the public eye.   These books shouldn’t moulder away in a dusty vault.   They should be brought out like this, put online and enjoyed by everyone.   So enjoy!

We’re so used to seeing movies being promoted in trailers but now it seems that books are getting the trailer promotion treatment too - and not just one book either but 12!

Is this the start of a whole new trend?     Will we be getting promotional trailers on YouTube for all the upcoming new book releases?

As long as it’s not voiced over by this guy.

Technorati Tags: books, movies, trailer, YouTube

There’s an interesting debate going on here in Germany at the moment about Adolf Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf“. German academics want the book re-printed before the copyright expires in 2015.

Normally the copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death, which is of course 2015 in this case. After that, the book falls into the public domain whereupon people can print their own copies for free, distribute them for free and so on. We might even see copies springing up on Project Gutenberg.

The whole issue is contentious of course because of the author and the subject of the book. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (German for “My Struggle”) in 1923 while in Landsberg prison, serving a sentence for treason. I read the book while at school - it is an awful book, full of anti-semitic hatred and vitriol. Hitler hates everyone, blames everyone and advocates killing everyone. Plus Hitler is no writer. He dictated his ranting and raving to his private secretary, Rudolf Hess, who wrote down every word, verbatim.

After the war, publication of the book was banned in Germany (for obvious reasons), the copyright was passed to the Bavarian finance ministry and existing copies of the book were very strictly controlled as to second-hand re-sale and private viewing. If you try to sell a used copy on eBay Germany for example, it is stopped. If a student wants to see a copy for study purposes, they need a letter of introduction from a teacher / professor explaining exactly why they need it and what course of study they are in which requires the book. They just can’t walk in and take the book off the shelf. This has led to copies being highly sought after by book collectors and I touched on this in an article some years back.

But now with the copyright deadline fast approaching, academics fear that right-wing extremists will use the public domain to circumvent the German laws and bring out their own versions of Mein Kampf with their own interpretations, their own introductions, their own glossaries, their own illustrations….

Far better, academics argue, that the German government takes a pro-active approach and brings out an officially sanctioned annotated version put properly into context. True, this won’t stop the right-wingers bringing out their copies in 2015 but at least by then, the official version will be out and this will give teachers and parents a chance to show curious schoolchildren the proper version. With anti-semitism on the rise in Germany, we need to show children SOMETHING.

But the government is not willing so far to budge. I really don’t understand their reluctance. You only have to go to Google and put in “Mein Kampf” to get this. It isn’t THAT hard to find it. Isn’t it better to work with the German Jewish community and put this vile book into its proper context? The Jewish community is all in favour and is ready to help and the Bavarian governor is apparently being approached. But they need to hurry because a project like this takes years to be done and the clock is ticking.

Technorati Tags: bavaria, books, germany, hitler, mein kampf, Nazi, reprint

LINK

Technorati Tags: books, hobbit, socks, tolkien

photo credit: stringberd

The 21 Steps is told by following the story as it unfolds across a map of the world. Follow the trail by clicking on the link at the bottom of each bubble. The first story is told by one of my favourite authors Charles Cumming. The story is good but it gets a bit tedious doing all that mouse clicking and waiting for the site to constantly load up.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: books, cumming, Google, maps, murder, mystery

photo credit: latahlibrary

While Google has made headlines over the last two years for scanning thousands of copyrighted works for its Book Search project, the Internet Archive is quietly digitizing around 1,000 public domain titles every day.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: archive, books, Digg, Google

photo credit: melodrama.ca

Do you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books? Sometimes it hards carrying around those big, clunky things. Well, now you can read in bite-sized chunks. DailyLit sends books right to you inbox in small messages that take less than a few minutes to read.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: books, email

photo credit: kthread

There is an excellent Google Earth documentary which shows the life and works of famous writer Jane Austen.

The collection is organised into three sections:

• the biography layer shows the actual places that she experienced over the course of her life.
• the second marks the real places in her literary works.
• the final section identifies the historical buildings used as backdrops for the major film adaptations of her books.

Austen is not my cup of tea but it is a remarkable collection nevertheless and I can see Austen fans lapping this one up.

Technorati Tags: austen, books, Google Earth

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who peered into the heavens with a homemade telescope as a boy and grew up to become a visionary titan of science fiction best-known for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick in writing the landmark film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” has died. He was 90. I am absolutely in shock that he is gone. Totally speechless.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: 2001, author, books, clarke, death, Digg, kubrick

A listing of all the posts that will make up the new book from Lifehacker.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: books, Digg, Lifehacker, Productivity