I'm a bit embarrassed to be introducing myself now; I've been here so many times but somehow never made an account- usually I'm looking for some bit of epub lore.
Anyway, I'm Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar, Inc., and founder of the
Unglue.it website. Unglue.it is dedicated to "ebooks that want to be free". We started a year and a half ago, doing crowdfunding the conversion of books into creative commons ebooks. So far, we've "unglued" 4 books, the most popular of which has been
Oral Literature in Africa. We're closing in on a 5th, an academic book in linguistics called
Complex Predicates.
But the big news is that we'll be relaunching in January with 2 new ways to support free ebooks. "
Buy-to-Unglue" will let authors set a revenue goal for their book; we'll sell the ebook and every sale will bring the "ungluing date" a bit closer. We have a
test campaign running now. As part of that, we've created a system to help libraries distribute these ebooks efficiently and without restrictive DRM. We'll also offer authors who have already released their books under Creative Commons licenses a chance to ask readers to reward them for their efforts.
I've been blogging about ebooks and libraries and other things that interest me at
Go to Hellman. I'm usually on twitter,
@gluejar.
I hope we'll be able to contribute a lot more unglued ebooks to this community- let me know if you have any questions.
(oh, and my favorite reading environment is Readmill. Those guys are great! My most recent ebook reads were
Dust and
Shift- I read
Wool in the print version!)
Eric