Bookyards – another resource for ebooks
By Paul Biba
Here’s another nice ebook resource mentioned to us by Donald Smith. We had previously mentioned the site here, but a more general mention is warranted. According to the site
The mission statement for bookyards.com is the following:
To provide the same information and content that one can receive at any large public library, and to provide it through the world wide web.
The need for such a site can be explained by studying a recent Smithsonian Institute Study that discovered that while a 14 year old American teenager had a vocabulary of 25,000 + words in his language in 1940, the same american teenager would have a vocabulary base of only 10,000 words today.
Our goal/dream is to be “The Library To The World”, in which books, education materials, information, reference materials, documents, and content will be provided freely to anyone who has an internet connection. By providing it in a format that will be both easy to use, useful and interesting, we strongly believe that we can then help in some small measure to reverse the trend that the Smithsonian Institute has discovered.
By bringing such a library to the world, and providing it to everyone regardless of race, age, creed, or religion, it is also our hope that at the end of the day we have helped in some small measure to improve the human condition.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
Bookyards looks like it could be — some day — an excellent and valuable site. As for ebooks, it has a way to go. Also it should be noted that currently it offers ebooks only in Adobe PDF form. Another problem is that when you select a book, you do not get a description of the book, which means you have to be already familiar with the title/author or simply experiment.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 am
The true ‘library to the world’ absolutely must be distributed and duplicated in many locations and countries — the more the better. In this sense, P2P distribution is the best way to go. And the format should be either a single open standard, universally accessible and able to be transformed into any other format by end-users, or should be a collection of several such standards.
As long as we are looking at an illegal copyright-busting operation, Pirate Bay is probably our best hope for the ‘universal library.’