The Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archive, has just launched a new version of its online e-book reader, featuring an improved user interface as well as other new tools. You can use it to read the more than 2 million books available via The Open Library and the Internet Archive.
The updated BookReader features:
- Redesigned user interface. Maximizes the amount of space given to the book.
- Navigation bar. Helps show your location in the book and navigate through it.
- New Read Aloud feature. Reads the book as audio in most browsers. No special software is needed
- Tables of contents. Automatically generated for most books and can be edited or added manually through the Open Library site.
- Vastly improved full-text search.
- More sharing options. Gives you to option to choose how to link to the book and set options when embedding the BookReader on a blog or website.
- Touch gesture support. Swipe to flip pages in two-page mode, pinch to zoom on iOS.
- Improved support for tablet devices. Like the iPad.
- Updated UI for the embedded BookReader. Now includes “expando” button to view the book in a new browser window.
- Integration with Open Library. Books that have an Open Library record can have their title and table of contents edited through the Open Library site. The chapter headings on Open Library link directly into the BookReader.
This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses.
Here’s an embedded book for you to play with. For any of our publicly accessible books you can embed it on your blog too by getting the embed code from the Share dialog.
Click on the music players below to enjoy some public domain music from the 20s and 30s from Archive.org.
The Internet Archive gives you free access to millions of documents and high-quality digital artifacts including more than 2,000 movies and 2,000 TV shows that are now in the public domain.
