100,000 Open Access Ebooks | unglue.it

Six years ago, in response to a Knight Foundation challenge program, we put in a proposal entitled “10,000 Creative Commons Ebooks”. We had compiled a list of 2,300 Creative Commons Licensed ebooks, and we thought that with some more resources we could identify as many as eight thousand more. We didn’t get the grant, but we kept on adding free ebooks to the Unglue.it catalog using automated processes and by individual discernment. We added Public Domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg, over 60,000 of them. We added over 30,000 Creative Commons licensed books from the Directory of Open Access books. We added computer books and textbooks, about 5,000 total. By the end of 2021, we had 102,692 open access books in our catalog and had distributed 6.45 million ebooks.

Along the way, we’ve been able to help our not-for-profit peers (Project Gutenberg, DOAB, etc.) improve their software, processes and metadata in small ways and big ways. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Our search facility could be 10x faster and smarter. We need to figure out how to make the collection more useful, by curation, by cataloguing, and by distribution ( by “we” I mean our community as a whole!).

2022 could be exciting in so many ways.