A version of this book was originally published as a series of blog posts written for No Shelf Required 2: Use and Management of Electronic Books, edited by Sue Polanka. It was then published as a chapter in Library Technology Reports: Expert Guides to Library Systems and Services, Volume 47, Number 8 (November/December 2011), page 18-27. The author would like to thank Sue and the editorial staff at ALA Techsource for their comments and suggestions. Any errors in this e-book version are entirely the author's. Also, many comments were received on the blog, some of which are included here, all of which contributed to the discourse and are greatly appreciated.
As the subject matter of the book is open-access e-books, it seemed important to put the extra effort needed to make it into an e-book and release it under a Creative Commons license. As a result, some minor revisions have been made. The Attribution license was chosen to allow readers to make additional contributions and to explore more of the creative possibilities of open-access e-books. If you decide to add material into the book, please do your best to respect the spirit of proper attribution. This is an area where social practice has not kept pace with the technical possibilities, so feel free to experiment.
The original blog posts are at:
Part 1. Introduction To Open-Access E-Books
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Part 2. What Open-Access Means For E-Books
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Part 3. Business Models To Create Open-Access E-Books
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Part 4. Libraries And Open-Access E-Books
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Part 5. Changing The World With Open-Access E-Books
