Established in 2006, the World eBook Fair (WeBF) is produced by the World Public Library Association with the goal to create equal access to knowledge and opportunity, especially to improve student achievement but also to provide access to a huge collection of eBooks worldwide for a month.
World eBook Fair Sponsors and E-Book Providers
Sponsors of the World eBook Fair include non-profit organizations that provide their e-books for free on a regular basis but also commercial e-book publishers that contribute a selection of their titles for free download for the duration of the fair. The main WeBF sponsors are:
- Project Gutenberg, a non-profit encouraging the creation and free distribution of e-books from public domain works or those whose authors have given distribution permission
- the World Public Library, a membership-based model focusing on classics but also documents, images, maps and photographs
- the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization providing access to books that fall under a Creative Commons license
- the DPP Store (EBooks About Everything), a for-profit e-bookseller
- the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), a non-profit providing access to sheet music
Other commercial sponsors include Ask.com, Baen Books (Science Fiction and Fantasy) and Mobile Books (PC to mobile downloads).
E-Books Available at the World eBook Fair
Though collections at the e-book fair exclude copyrighted material like current bestsellers and others, that still leaves an impressive array of material available for download. Formats used are Adobe pdf, plain text, e-books for cell phones and MP3 files. Here are some of the most popular areas of the last years:
- technical manuals and technical references
- children’s books
- classic literature
- educational resources
- U.S. government agency collections
- foreign language ebooks
- audio books
- ebooks for mobile phones
EBook Volume at Previous World eBook Fairs
The World eBook Fair is created with the help of more than 100 electronic libraries from around the world. This year, the aim is to provide access to 1.5 million e-books! Here’s a statistic of how much the book inventory of the World eBook Fair has grown in just three short years:
2008: 1.2 million
2007: 750,000
2006: 350,000
The Idea Behind Providing Free EBook Downloads
Project Gutenberg-founder Michael Hart stresses on the WeBF homepage the fact that just having access to books will open the door to literacy and education for children from an early age on: “In the next census, you will find that about 30% of people are getting a college education and many more are getting advanced degrees because of something as simple as learning to read at an early age.”
Yet, a college degree is not something to be taken for granted even today: “The changes made by the public library system, hand in hand with grade schools through colleges, have been so enormous that it is hard to get a perspective on the fact the odds are about 10 times as great today a person will get a college education as it was 100 years ago.”
So, regardless if student, researcher, librarian or book lover, with 1.5 million books available, chances are good that anyone will find something interesting at the World eBook Fair. And participation in a virtual book fair is simpler than going to an actual one: come July 4th, simply log on to the World eBook Fair website, browse and start downloading!
Readers who enjoyed this article might also be interested in learning more about Project Gutenberg or the Bookseller Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.
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