site functionality
Unglue.it Website is now Open Source
As part of our shift to operation as a community-supported 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, we’ve opened up the source code to the Unglue.it web application and website. You can now report issues, help us fix bugs, or run your own version of unglue.it from the git repository on GitHub. (You can’t use the name unglue.it without […]
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The Ebook Turns 50; FEF Monographs Fund.
On July 4, 1971, Michael Hart made the text of the Declaration of Independence available on the arpanet (which is now the Internet). Although books in digital form certainly existed before that, many of us regard the beginning of Project Gutenberg as the birth of the ebook. We have a bit more than 6 months […]
70,000 Free Ebooks, 1.8 Million Served
70,681 and 1,853,832 as of November 1, 2019, but who’s counting? It’s been a while since we’ve reported on our progress building the free ebook catalog of all free ebook catalogs, but yes, we’ve been busy. Since people ask, here are some statistics. The two biggest components of the catalog are Project Gutenberg (56,986 works) […]
57,000 free GITenberg ebooks are now in Unglue.it
Over the past month, the Free Ebook Foundation’s GITenberg program has rebuilt and refreshed over 57,000 ebooks from Project Gutenberg, and has loaded them into Unglue.it. These books are mostly in the Public Domain. They join our collection of about 7000 open-licensed books that are still in-copyright. As a result of the growth of our […]
Translating the Khasis’ hidden treasure
You probably have never heard of Soso Tham. We certainly hadn’t until a few weeks ago. You’ve probably never even heard of the Khasi people, 1.6 million of whom live in the foothills of the Himalaya. Soso Tham is the best known poet of the Khasi language. If you’ve never heard of the Khasi in the first place, […]
Unglue.it has resumed crowdfunding
Government funding for the humanities, the arts, and education has come under attack. The President’s budget proposal announced in March would eliminate the NEH and NEA. The US Department of Education wants partners to develop open educational resources, but has no funding to support them. So when the Free Ebook Foundation’s strategic planning process began […]
Unglue.it Goes Non-Profit
Since its beginning 4 years ago, Unglue.it has been a part of Gluejar, Inc., a privately held for-profit company. We initially thought Unglue.it would be mostly about crowd-funding books into the public commons. While unglue.it has always put a public benefit at the center of its mission, the for-profit status made sense for a crowdfunding […]
Unglue.it joins GITenberg
Unglue.it has been of two minds about public domain ebooks. On the one hand, we recognize that the public domain contains the greatest literary works ever produced, and ebooks of these works need to be on any serious reader’s ebook shelf. On the other hand, there are plenty of web sites already focused on the […]
Embedding “Thanks for Ungluing” Links in E-Books
One of the difficulties we’ve noticed with “Thanks for Ungluing” is that the “Ask” comes at the wrong time. When you click the “Read It Now” button on the Unglue.it website, we let rights holders request your support for their work. You can go ahead and download the book anyway, but even if you don’t […]
“Zero Sum Game” is an Exponential Transformation
“I’m just really good at math” is Cas Russell’s excuse for having superpowers. She’s the heroine of Zero Sum Game, SL Huang‘s debut novel. If you think about it, “being good at math” makes a lot more sense than Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider. Even if you slept through freshman biology, you probably picked up that radioactive spiders […]
Non-profit “Champion of Openness” adds its first 2 CC books to Unglue.it
When Davis Erin Anderson, Community Engagement Manager at The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), contacted me about sponsoring two “Thanks for Ungluing” campaigns for their CC-licensed book titles, I was delighted to add them to our Unglue.it catalog. A non-profit organization located in Manhattan, METRO works to develop and maintain essential library services throughout […]
