Hi, Megan here with a new screencast for you! Some of the books available for borrowing from Open Library require Adobe’s Digital Editions program. This screencast will help make sense of installing it on your computer and getting started with it. You’ll also see how you can return books once you’re done with them. Happy borrowing!
Armistice Day
From The Western Front, published in 1917. A series of sketches, drawings and paintings from the ‘Ruined Tower of Becordel-Becourt’ to the ‘The Giant Slotters,’ Mr. Muirhead Bone’s sketches give us a unique eyewitness account of life on the Western Front.
There are over 2,800 books you can read online about World War, 1914-1918.
KohaCon10 & our API
I’ve just returned from a trip to Wellington where I presented about Open Library to the people assembled at KohaCon10. I had a lovely time meeting everyone involved, and was thoroughly impressed by the community that surrounds this 10 year old, successful open source project. A hearty congratulations to everyone involved! At the end of the conference, we were shown a fabulous Gource source code visualization of “10 years in 10 minutes,” which visualizes 10 years of Koha development. Seriously cool.
Stability Improvements
The openlibrary.org website used to become unavailable for short durations whenever we deployed new code. This was a due a problem in lighttpd fastcgi handling. Now we switched to gunicorn, a brand new web server in Python, and that solved this problem. Code deploys are now very smooth and this is a major step towards improving the overall stability of the system.
Reading Desk 2.0
We’re busily preparing for tomorrow and Friday’s Books in Browsers conference here at the Internet Archive. In terms of the Open Library, the meeting will herald the release of a flurry of new features, including our new Full Text search and a redesign of the Internet Archive BookReader. (More on those later.)
It just so happens that when we moved into our new home — formerly a Christian Science Church — we inherited a bunch of furniture, including some classic old reading desks that came out of the church’s reading room. We’ve given them an update, and thanks to Raj, you can see Reading Desk 2.0:
Reading Desk 2.0, built by Jermaine, soon to be running the new IA touch bookreader!
Reading Desk 2.0, June, Brewster, Jermaine, Chris
Brewster at the Desk
Woo!