Steve speaks with Eric Hellman and Andromeda Yelton from Unglue.it.
Unglue.it offers a win-win solution to readers, who want to read and share their favorite books conveniently, and rights holders, who want to be rewarded for their work.
They run crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for specific, already-published books. When they reach goals set by the rights holders, they’ll pay them to unglue their work. The rights holders will issue an electronic edition with a Creative Commons license as specified during the campaign. These licenses will make the edition free and legal for everyone to read, copy, and share, worldwide.
At Unglue.it, book lovers can pledge money to support these campaigns; add books to their wishlist to tell the world about their favorites; discuss their favorite books; share their Unglue.it pages via social media; and find direct links to public domain and unglued ebooks that they can read right away.
Campaign to unglue So You Want to Be a Librarian by Lauren Pressley
Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar, is a technologist, entrepreneur, and writer. After 10 years at Bell Labs in physics research, Eric became interested in technologies surrounding e-journals and libraries. His first business, Openly Informatics, developed OpenURL linking software and knowledgebases, and was acquired by OCLC in 1996. At OCLC, he led the effort to productize and expand the xISBN service, and began the development of OCLC’s Electronic Resource Management offerings. After leaving OCLC, Eric began blogging at Go To Hellman. He covers the intersection of technology, libraries and ebooks, and has written extensively on the Semantic Web and Linked Data. Eric has a B.S.E. from Princeton University, and a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Andromeda Yelton is a former Latin teacher and recent library science graduate (with a background in mathematics) who’s quickly made a name for herself in the library world. She has a BA in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an MA in Classics from Tufts, and recently completed her MLS from Simmons. She blogs atAcross Divided Networks and at ALA TechSource, and won the 2010 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award for the article “A Simple Scheme for Book Classification Using Wikipedia”. She is a 2011 American Library AssociationEmerging Leader. Andromeda was one of the leaders of the crowdsourced philanthropy project Buy India a Library. She also has first-hand experience with public broadcasting- she was once a listener contestant on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
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