Unglue.it and Open Book Publishers Announce New Crowdfunding Campaign
From an Unglue.it Announcement:
Unglue.it is pleased to announce a second crowdfunding campaign from the nonprofit UK company Open Book Publishers for the first English translation of Sara Roncaglia’s Feeding the City, an ethnographic study of the dabbawala co-operative system of lunch delivery in Mumbai.
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Unglue.it is a crowdfunding site that lets book lovers pay authors and publishers to make their already-published books free to the world under a Creative Commons license.
This is the second campaign from Open Book Publishers, who released the Unglued Ebook of Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth Finnegan in September 2012. More than 3,000 total CC-licensed ebook copies of Oral Literature in Africa have been downloaded from sites all over the world since publication.
In this new campaign OBP wants to make this the ebook of another unique ethnographic study available for free, forever, to the world: If $7,500 is raised from Unglue.it supporters by May 31, 2013, the English translation of Feeding the City will be released as a free, Unglued Ebook by July 2013, along with the hardcover and paperback editions to be sold by Open Book Publishers.
The dabbawalas of Mumbai were cited by Forbes magazine in 1998 as a Six Sigma success story and have consequently become a Harvard Business School Case study. Nevertheless there is no single book devoted to this cooperative example that would be available outside academic libraries or freely available to those in India and other countries. As a consequence, those who might most benefit from understanding the multi-faith and intercultural uniqueness of this long-standing indigenous Mumbai enterprise cannot read more about its history and its cooperative philosophy.
See Also: Crowdfunding Allows Unglue.it to ‘Unglue’ Two More Books (Jan 22. 2013)
See Also: The Crowdfunding of eBooks: Unglue.it Formally Launches (May 15, 2012)
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Libraries, News

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.