British Library Offers Free Downloads for Kindle
February 9, 2010
Short honk: I wrote a few days ago about national libraries not stepping up to the job of scanning their holdings and making them available. Well, wouldn’t you know? The addled goose was wrong. The British Library is making 19th century first editions available via Amazon for the heavily DRMed Kindle. I have a Kindle, so I the goose is in fine feathers. You can read about these 65,000 “rare first editions” in the Telegraph’s “British Library to Offer 19th Century First Editions for Free Download on Amazon Kindle” and get the details. Unlike the commercial services offering special collections, I think the search and retrieval function may be a bit undernourished. I find the Amazon Kindle search system a drag to use. Heck, I think the Amazon.com search service is almost as bad as Apple’s iTunes’ service.
The 19th century novel has been a area of study I loved. I used to read quickly and with great recall. I remember even today such monumental factoids as the name of Pip’s pal in Great Expectations. (You know, Herbert Pocket.) First editions are interesting if you have the subsequent editions that incorporate either the meddling publisher’s fixes or the author’s attempts to salvage a real loser of a novel based on an even lousier series of monthly segments. (Think Pickwick Papers.) The scholar can work through various editions and identify changes. Some of these research nuggets lead to PhDs if not to jobs.
If you hunger for a penny dreadful, you are in luck. Just make sure you own a Kindle.
My hope is that the British Library shifts into high gear and scans, makes searchable, and offers to researchers its collections of periodicals, broadsheets, and books.
With Google being drawn and quartered by everyone from legal eagles to relatives of deceased writers, the national libraries may have to convert their materials to digital form. I don’t plan on buying microfilm reels from ProQuest or hoping that poor conservation methods will preserve millions of fragile information objects.
My concern is that the collection shows the British Library can do the job. Now the library has to finish the job. Without Google, the ball is back in the national libraries’ side of the court in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I will report this free work to the National Archives, which is embarking on its own digitization project I hear.
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