The 5th Annual World eBook Fair is coming July 4th through August 4th 2010, where about 3.5 million ebooks will be made available for free from over 100 contributing ebook libraries all over the world.
Some top contributing sources include The Internet Archive, World Public Library, Wattpad, Project Gutenberg, and International Music Score Library Project, with vast collections of classic literature, technical ebooks, medical publications, reference books, scientific items, and education material—along with some other digital media such as audiobooks, music, movies, etc.
Also included are a number of children’s ebooks from the Internet Archive’s Children’s Library and World Public Library, along with the single largest publicly accessible online military library ever created, the Military and Armed Forces Library, with 16,079 ebooks and documents.
This year’s ebook fair aims to reach more people than ever by including different ebook reading programs that people can use to read ebooks on cellphones, MP3 players, iPods, and other portable media players. Reaching people through cellphones is especially important, according to Micheal Hart of Project Gutenberg and co-founder of the World eBook Fair, who has this to say on the subject:
“There aren’t even a million Kindles or Sony’s, but there are now ~4 1/2 billion cell phones—which means the possibility of reading readers via cell phones is larger than any other media.
The cell phone is the wave of the future, not, I repeat, NOT the Kindle or Sony approach, for they are only targeting millions, and I should like very much to reach billions of people.”
When the World eBook Fair first started back in 2006, they had about 350,000 ebooks available. In just 5 years that number has increased tenfold. Just think what the number will be in another 5 years.