Dive Brief:
- A new $1 million program announced this month aims to create e-books from out-of-print humanities books.
- The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund the project, handing out grants for publishers to identify, acquire rights to, and make available “great” humanities books, the groups reported in a press release.
- The books acquired through the Humanities Open Book program will be available for free under a Creative Commons license.
Dive Insight:
To qualify for the program, a book must have “demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.” The idea behind the project is that tens of thousands of great books published in the last 100 years in the fields of history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and science history and philosophy have been lost to current readers. The two groups will provide the $1 million to convert the books to digital files with searchable texts, available for free download and formatted for viewing any device.