World E-Book Fair

[toomanybooks]

Welcome to the 4th Annual
World eBook Fair
July 4th to August 4th
Download Your Selections from (2,000,000 PDF eBooks)
Two Million eBooks Titles


Two Million Free [and Commercial] eBooks at
World eBook Fair

Welcome to The Fourth World eBook Fair where we hope you will enjoy at least a few of the books that are presented here, now in the millions.


Brief History of The World eBook Fair


Just two years ago The First World eBook Fairs came on the scene with about 1/3 million books and doubled to 2/3 million in 2008, and over a a million and a quarter presented last year.

Now over two million.

Created by contributions from 100+ eLibraries around the world, the largest collections are:

At midnight Central Daylight Time May 21, 2009 these were the approximate numbers:

100,000 from Project Gutenberg
500,000 from The World Public Library
1,385,000 from The Internet Archive
250,000 from eBooks About Everything
17,000 from IMSLP's Music eLibrary
=========
2,252,000 Grand Total

Since we are adding over a thousand books each business day, we should have little trouble in reaching our goal of 2 1/2 million by July 4-- once again doubling the total of the eBooks we are presenting to the general public.

http://worldebookfair.org/

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Please note that these ebooks are PDF files, but this might be an opportunity to get some interesting books.

[JSWolf]

Please note that these ebooks are PDF files, but this might be an opportunity to get some interesting books.

I'd like to know who runs this World eBook Fair because whoever does, does not understand eBooks. This fair is a farce. Sorry, but PDF only? That's a joke. We have people reading on devices that are 6" screens or smaller and they think PDF is going to be a good format? Best off canceling the fair instead of looking foolish.

[bgalbrecht]

It's some friend/business associate of Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. I find the totals to be rather questionable, since all the national Project Gutenbergs collectively have far less than 100,000 books. PG USA has just under 30,000 books, and the rest have far less. In the first or second year, I looked at it and saw a huge number of duplicate editions that were generated from the original PG source. Also, most of the PDFs appeared to be generated from text sources with no attempt to regenerate the original formatting, or include images if there had been an HTML edition with images at PG.

At the time I looked at it, Google had released about a million public domain books through Google Books, and Michael Hart was sending out a lot of propaganda for the World Ebook Fair and how it had more books than Google, which IMHO was not true, and not even close to true.

[Renaldo]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'd like to know who runs this World eBook Fair because whoever does, does not understand eBooks. This fair is a farce. Sorry, but PDF only? That's a joke. We have people reading on devices that are 6" screens or smaller and they think PDF is going to be a good format? Best off canceling the fair instead of looking foolish.

I absolutely have to agree. PDF only formatting is ridiculous if you're doing anything but reading on a computer screen or printing it out to a file. And this 'ebook fair' site doesn't seem to be anything more than a collection of search features for pre-existing websites featuring free content. It's like saying I'm launching a new search engine, and just throwing up three links to Google, Yahoo and Bing.

[cbell]

Thank you, toomanybooks.

Many people read PDFs happily on their monitors and I think World eBook Fair is a great idea.

I appreciate the efforts of the organisers and found several sites I was unaware existed at:

http://worldebookfair.org/Collections.htm

[Dr. Drib]

In the interests of full disclosure: This is an organization that charges money. Whether PDFs are useful to you will have to be your decision.

Quoted:

"Our goal is to provide Free public access for a month to 2 Million eBooks. During the rest of the year you may continue to download your selection of about 500,000 PDF eBooks by joining the World Public Library. Annual membership is only $8.95 per year."


Don

[astra]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

In the interests of full disclosure: This is an organization that charges money. Whether PDFs are useful to you will have to be your decision.

Quoted:

"Our goal is to provide Free public access for a month to 2 Million eBooks. During the rest of the year you may continue to download your selection of about 500,000 PDF eBooks by joining the World Public Library. Annual membership is only $8.95 per year."


Don

TANSTAAFL

[JSWolf]

Paying for PDF is a bad idea. And in this case most of them are not even well formatted PDF. Just please give it a miss till they can clean up their act.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Paying for PDF is a bad idea. And in this case most of them are not even well formatted PDF. Just please give it a miss till they can clean up their act.

Did you even read this thread prior to chiming in to whine about PDF???

They are selling free content. Why people shouldn't pay for it doesn't have one damn thing to do with the format.

- Ahi

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ahi

Did you even read this thread prior to chiming in to whine about PDF???

They are selling free content. Why people shouldn't pay for it doesn't have one damn thing to do with the format.

- Ahi

A lot of people do pay for content that's otherwise free because they aren't good at converting or don't know how to do it or that they can do it.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

A lot of people do pay for content that's otherwise free because they aren't good at converting or don't know how to do it or that they can do it.

This isn't otherwise free. This is free.

They are selling access to unaltered, unchanged, unconverted content that is freely available.

This is the literal equivalent of me starting to sell unaltered Project Gutenberg .txt files (byte for byte the same ones on the PG website) for $8.99 monthly subscription on my website. Unconverted, unchanged, uncorrected. No value added whatsoever.

And, as noted already, the fact that they are PDFs has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem. It is that they are (from an ebook reading device perspective) missized PDFs that is the issue.

- Ahi