The Information Commons in Library West

If you can rent movies, why can’t you rent textbooks??  Well, apparently you can!

Last Saturday, the New York Times published an article about a couple of Textbook rental companies.  This particular article features two companies – Chegg: http://www.chegg.com and Book Renter: http://www.bookrenter.com/

A cursory Google search turned up two more companies:  Campus Book Rentals:  http://www.campusbookrentals.com and Skoobit: http://www.skoobit.com

On “Giving Back”
Chegg plants a tree for every  textbook they rent, Campus Book Rentals dontates money to OLPC, and Book Renter goes “green” a number of ways including the Green Press Initiative.

Have you ever rented a textbook?  If so, from where?  Was it a positive experience?

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Last Thursday, I posted a list of apps for reading eBooks on your iPhone or Blackberry.   I received a few emails about other applications and this one stood out from the bunch:

Eucalyptus: http://th.ingsmadeoutofotherthin.gs/eucalyptus/

• Available for:  iPhone and iPod Touch only
• 20,000 classics at your command (they pay 20% royalty to Project Gutenberg)
• turn the pages with a flick of a finger.
• use Library of Congress Subject headings
• organizes books like iTunes organizes songs and albums
• text resizing with just a finger pinch
• several font choices
• remembers the last page you were reading.
• bookshelf of recommended reads from Eucalyptus staff.

Thanks Michelle N.!  :D

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Summer Time… and the Readin’s Easy…

Lots of ways to obtain and read eBooks on your mobile device these days.  Here are a few of the many available:

CLASSICS: http://www.classicsapp.com

• Available for: iPhone and iPod Touch
• Allows you to download and read some of the great literary classics in the world such as Call of the Wild, Huckleberry Finn, Pride and Prejudice, Treasure Island, and Paradise Lost.
• Automatically remembers where you last finished reading and will flip to that page when you reopen the app.
• Table of Contents available.

FICTIONWISE: http://www.fictionwise.com/help/ereader-overview.htm

• Free App Available for:
  • iPhone & iPod Touch
  • Blackberry
  • Windows Mobile Smartphones
  • Palm Devices & Pocket PCs
• http://www.fictionwise.com/help/readingDevicesFAQ.htm
• over 50,000 book titles available for purchase at this site.
• Built-in backlight for easy reading in low light situations

KINDLE APP FOR iPHONE: http://tinyurl.com/q7tbnc

• Available for iPhone and iPod Touch.
• No Kindle required.
• Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch.
• Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you.
• Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync
• Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle.
• Access to over 285,000 books.
• Buy a book from the Kindle Store optimized for Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch and get it auto-delivered wirelessly.
• Read in portrait or landscape mode
• Select alternate background and text colors to improve reading comfort in low light conditions
• Tap on either side of the screen or flick to turn pages
• Pinch to zoom images in books.

SHORT COVERS: http://shortcovers.com/mobile.html

• Available for:
  •  iPhone and iPod Touch 
  • Blackberry Smartphones
  • Google Android enabled phones
• Find your next great read: choose from tens of thousands of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs.
• Purchase, download and read: right on your iPhone. No expensive eReader required.
• Customize your reading experience: choose pagination options, adjust font size, styles and colours, and more.
• Share and recommend: Connect over great reads and share via email, Twitter and coming soon, Facebook.
• Try before you buy: read free samples, then purchase the eBook and coming soon, order the physical edition through our partners: Barnes & Noble or Chapters-Indigo

STANZA BY LEXCYCLE: http://www.lexcycle.com/

• Available for: iPhone or iPod Touch
• Online Catalog contains links to over 100,000 books, from classics to contemporary works
• Move your existing books onto Stanza iPhone/iPod by using the free Stanza Desktop application for Mac & PC.
• Customize font sizes and colors, portrait mode or landscape, justification, line spacing, and hyphenation.
• Sort by title or author, or create custom collections to create reading lists and keep track of all your books.
• Stanza always remembers where you last left off in the book, and also lets you bookmark your favorite parts.
• built-in support for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Danish, Portuguese, and Swedish.
• Print-quality resolution, soft backlighting for nighttime reading, intuitive screen taps to turn pages.

COMING SOON: 

ICEBERG BY SCROLL MOTION: http://www.scrollmotion.com/iceberg.html 

• http://www.scrollmotion.com/movies/Iceberg_Demo.m4v (video demo)
• Each and every book exists as its own application right in iTunes.
• Iceberg maintains pagination. This means that every one page in an Iceberg book is equivalent to a page in a print copy of a book.
• Text can get bigger and smaller as readers pinch in and out.  Iceberg text reflows automatically so there’s no annoying scrolling across the page.
• Readers can search text, take notes, and skim through pages via an organic and intuitive interface.
• Each book acts as a gateway to other titles in the bookstore, which is located right inside of iTunes. Readers can buy books instantly, as soon as their interest is piqued.  They can get books when they want them, wherever they are – anytime, anywhere.

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The Challenge: Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009

You’ve been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat. 

The folks over at Infinite Summer (http://www.infinitesummer.org) have set up a site along with social networking tools to provide a support group of sorts to help you get plow through the slew of footnotes in this very wonderful novel by David Foster Wallace.  You can follow them on Twitter (#infsum) or join their FaceBook group (see the website for the FB link).

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Have some books that you think you’d like to share with the community?   Consider using Book Crossing as a unique way of recycling your books by “releasing them into the wild” for others to find.

It’s really easy- sign up for an account (takes less than a minute) and then you register the book(s) you want to release. After that, all you have to do is leave the book(s) anywhere – a coffee shop, dorm couch, bench outside the library, laundromat, waiting room, etc.    Book Crossing will allow you to track your book’s journey around the world as it passes on from person to person.

Over 772,000 people around the world participate in Book Crossing.  Why not give it a try?  Maybe if enough of us band together, we can put Gainesville back on the Book Crossing map!

Find out more about Book Crossing here: http://www.bookcrossing.com/

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