Best known for Paradise Lost, John Milton was a poet, author, polemicist and civil servant born on December 9, 1608.
The 1860 Collier edition of Paradise Lost includes some beautiful illustrations by Gustave Doré too. Well worth a look!
There are also over 1,000 books about Milton in Open Library, if you’re interested to read critically about him.
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!
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.
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!
Thanks again to Super Intern, Megan for creating this excellent screencast about merging authors on Open Library. It’s been a fantastically successful release so far, resulting in over 100,000 edits in the last 28 days! You can watch merges as they happen in the new Author Merges recent changes view. Thanks, Megan!