Unglue.it and GITenberg Join Together to Form Free Ebook Foundation
From the Free Ebook Foundation Launch Announcement:
Two projects that have been building towards a sustainable ecosystem for free ebooks have joined together in a new non-profit corporation. The Free Ebook Foundation envisions a world where ebooks will be funded, distributed and maintained for the benefit of all, by coordinating the efforts and resources of many.
Unglue.it and GITenberg, the two projects to be supported by the Free Ebook Foundation, have shared the goals of making free ebooks more available while focusing on different problems.Unglue.it launched in 2012 with a focus on sustainable funding models for freely-licensed ebooks. For the last two years, it has worked to improve the access and distribution of these books by building a database of over 1200 Creative Commons licensed ebooks. Unglue.it has been incubated by Gluejar, Inc., a privately held company founded by Eric Hellman
GITenberg began in 2013 when Seth Woodworth wanted to improve some ebooks from Project Gutenberg. He decided to load the ebooks onto GitHub, a version control and collaborative software development platform. There are now 43,000 public domain ebooks in GITenberg, open to use and improvement by anyone. Earlier this year, GITenberg received a prototype grant from the Knight Foundation, and has been operating with fiscal sponsorship of the Miami Foundation.
Read the Complete Announcement
Includes Comments by Eric Hellman and names of Free Ebook Foundation Trustees.
Filed under: Funding, Public Libraries, Resources
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.
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