Our little lending library is continuing to grow, this time with 90 new titles purchased directly from two fabulous eBook publishers: A Book Apart & Smashwords.

3 titles from A Book Apart are all must-reads for any discerning web professional…

Thanks to Mandy, Jeffrey and Jason at A Book Apart for joining in the fun. (Incidentally, Mandy’s blog, A Working Library, is a great read.)

There are also 87 ePubs from Smashwords, by authors like Amanda Hocking, Ruth Ann Nordin and Gerald M. Weinberg…

Thanks to @markcoker at Smashwords for working with us to get these new titles online.

Loans through the Open Library are exclusive to one Open Library account holder at once, for up to two weeks. For most titles, you can access the eBooks in one of three ways: directly in your web browser (using our BookReader), as a PDF or ePub (downloaded into Adobe Digital Editions). The new Smashwords titles are a bit different – they’re only available in ePub format, so only downloadable and readable in Adobe Digital Editions.

The Internet Archive (and Open Library) is actively seeking publishers who’d like us to buy their eBooks and make them available in the Lending Library. If you are a publisher interested to sell us your wares, please get in touch!

While that Lending Library — available to anyone with an Open Library account — is growing, we’re also working to expand the collection for our “In-Library” loans, currently at about 85,000 eBooks. This special In-Library program is a bit different, because it requires patrons to literally be inside a participating library’s network. Once that’s the case, patrons can see all the books available in the In-Library collection on Open Library, from all the libraries in the In-Library pool, currently around 150 North American libraries.