site functionality
Free eBooks by ISBN
After reflecting on the coming demise of xISBN, we decided to add an endpoint for free ebooks to the unglue.it API. The API documentation is at https://unglue.it/api/help With an API key, you can check if there’s a free ebook for any ISBN. ISBNs can be 10 or 13 digits, and can include dashes. This service […]
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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 […]
Mur Lafferty’s Afterlife Series on Unglue.it!
Pro tip for authors: don’t kill off your heroes on page one, then destroy heaven and earth 3 ways before page 150 in the first book of a series. Unless, of course, you happen to have the talent and imagination to pull off something that audacious. Which is what Mur Lafferty does successfully in Heaven, […]
New Stories about Africa’s Future by Young Africans
I’ve been a compulsive reader all my life, and some of my favorite authors have written about Africa, Nobel Prize winners Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka; the filmmaker, Ousemene Sembène, the novelist Chinua Achebe. But like most Americans, I have read very little by people my age or younger, especially contemporary African writers […]
Creative Commons Books that Want Promotion
Unglue.it is putting together a special promotion for Creative Commons licensed ebooks, to run between Christmas and New Year’s. If you’d like your book to be part of the promotion, please let us know at rights@gluejar.com. If you’d like to nominate a book, leave a comment.
A Bookstore for Books that Want to be Free
Soon, we’ll be launching a new phase of Unglue.it. How do we describe what we’re doing? When we did the first implementation of “Buy-To-Unglue” (as a test, not a launch) I told a lot of people about it, but it wasn’t so easy to explain. Unglue.it would be sort of a Crowdfunding site, sort of […]
Buy-to-Unglue Test Campaign: Flatland
After a lot of hard work, we’re now ready for some real-world testing of “Buy-to -Unglue“. We’re offering an epub of the public domain classic, Flatland. We want to make sure everything works well, fix any bugs, and show our publishing, author and library partners what the new world of ebooks can look like. Please […]
