Introduction

Most of this book concentrates on acquiring and managing e-books that are commercially available. But there are other options. Almost as soon as the internet came into existence, it was being used to freely disseminate full textbooks and reports. At first these were created through typing in basic ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange 2) text, then with desktop publishing and word-processing applications, and by scanning in existing text and using OCR to instantly create keyword searchable text files. Now graphical, audio and video elements are embedded in books and documents through the use of cheap and widely available hardware and software.

Today, there are millions of texts freely available online through myriads of small scale efforts right on up to the behemoth that is Google Books. However, few libraries are currently making full use of this fantastic resource. This chapter aims to raise awareness of a small fraction of this content, explain the pros and cons of free e-books, address some of the issues involved with managing ongoing access to a collection that contains freely available texts, and also introduce the option of creating e-books in-house, by writing them from scratch or through digitizing existing published or unpublished works.

Making use of free e-books

Advantages

Free e-books have one rather obvious advantage – they do not require an acquisitions budget. But the following should also be considered: