August 2006 > Google Books, the worldwide Google program for books
The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books. Google Books has provided the full text of public domain books, and has offered excerpts for copyrighted books. As of December 2008, Google had 24 library partners, including a Swiss one (University Library of Lausanne), a French one (Lyon Municipal Library), a Belgian one (Ghent University Library), a German one (Bavarian State Library), two Spanish ones (National Library of Catalonia and University Complutense of Madrid), and a Japanese one (Keio University Library). The U.S. partner libraries were, by alphabetical order: Columbia University, Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), Cornell University Library, Harvard University, New York Public Library, Oxford University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
August 2006 > The Open Content Alliance, a universal public digital library
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched in August 2006 to build a world public permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The project started in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit, and governmental organizations gathering around the Internet Archive to digitize public domain books around the world. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in December 2006 in the Text Archive of the Internet Archive, with 12,000 new ebooks posted per month. Unlike Google Books, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) has made them searchable through any web search engine, and has not scanned copyrighted books, except when the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media, and the Prelinger Archives. One million ebooks in December 2008 and two million ebooks in March 2010 were available under OCA principles in the Internet Archive.
August 2006 > A version of the union catalog WorldCat for free on the web
In August 2006, WorldCat, the union catalog run by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), began migrating to the web through the beta version of its new website worldcat.org. OCLC was created as early as 1971 as a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering access to the world's information while reducing information costs. In 2005, WorldCat had 61 million bibliographic records in 400 languages, provided by 9,000 member libraries in 112 countries. In 2006, 73 million bibliographic records were linking to one billion documents available in these libraries. Through the current WorldCat, member libraries have now provided free access to their catalogs, and free or paid access to their electronic resources: books, audiobooks, abstracts and full-text articles, photos, music CDs, and videos. In April 2010, WorldCat provided records linking to 1,5 billion documents.
2006 > Twitter, or information in 140 characters
Founded in 2006 in California by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool for users to send free short messages of 140 characters maximum, called tweets, via the internet, IM (Instant Messaging), or SMS (Short Message Service). Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter has since gained worldwide popularity, with 106 million users in April 2010, and 300,000 new users per day. As for tweets, there were 5,000 per day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2.5 million in 2009, 50 million in January 2010, and 55 million in April 2010, with the archiving of tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the trends of our time, and their inclusion by Google in the results of its search engine.
October 2006 > The Sony Reader, a new ebook reader
The Sony Reader was launched in October 2006 in the U.S. for US $350. The Sony Reader was the first ebook reader to use the new advanced E Ink screen technology, "a screen that gives an excellent reading experience very close to that of real paper, making it very easy going on the eyes" (Mike Cook, editor of epubBooks.com). Another major feature of the reader over most other electronic devices is its battery life, with over 7,000 pages turns - or up to two weeks of power - on just one battery charge. It was the first ebook reader to use Adobe's Digital Editions. The Sony Reader is presently available in the U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, and France, with cheaper and revamped models.