Open Content, eBooks & the Digital Library

A couple days ago, Maryanne posted about the recent Google Book Search release of the complete works of William Shakespeare. After reading her post, a member of the BlendedEdu community, directed our attention to an alternative to Google Books.

Bookyards is an open content eBook and Digital Library portal with "10,101 books, 22,141 web links, 3,941 news & blogs links and access to hundreds of online libraries (200,000 eBooks) for your reading pleasure."

In his comment on our blog, Victor points out that Bookyards also has a digital collection of Shakespeare's writings. It's great to see that there is such a growing interest in digital libraries.

And I for one am very supportive of any movement that opens content, knowledge and education to as many people as possible. I also acknowledge and appreciate people like Victor (and the Google Books team) who put in the hard work of creating digital library portals and digitize books.

I'd also encourage Google to work through some of their issues and find a way to work in a collaborative matter with organizations like Microsoft, Yahoo!, The Open Content Alliance (OCA), The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL), and Bookyards in creating a truly open and equitable solution for creating a Digital Library on the web.

Web Resources

• Bookyards
• Google Books & Shakespeare
• Open Content Alliance
• COSL