Category Archives: online books

Why Lake Ontario is remaining Lake Ontario in the Online Books catalog

Posted on August 28, 2026 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Yesterday Donald Trump ordered the Interior Department to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in its Geographic Names System (GNIS). If your first thought on hearing the news was “I wonder if library subject headings will change?” … Continue reading →

Posted in libraries, metadata, online books, sharing | Tagged | 1 Comment

Trails and tours in library online environments

Posted on March 6, 2026 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Below is the text of the lightning talk I gave at Code4Lib 2026 earlier this week, on March 3. The conference venue where I delivered it is located at 1 Dock Street in Old City Philadelphia. Links below go to … Continue reading →

Posted in censorship, citizen librarians, discovery, libraries, online books, people, preservation, teaching | Tagged | 2 Comments

How to help people find good reading on The Online Books Page (Some dos and don’ts)

Posted on February 13, 2026 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The catalog of free online books and serials at The Online Books Page continues to grow and improve every week. You can watch our new books listings, or subscribe to our RSS feed, to see what books we’ve newly cataloged … Continue reading →

Posted in citizen librarians, discovery, metadata, online books, open access, people, privacy, reading, sharing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Stoking creative fires: Counting down to Public Domain Day 2026

Posted on November 12, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Until I saw it performed earlier this month, I had doubts that one could successfully adapt an unthemed magazine issue into a stage play. But that’s what the New Classics Collective did with the first and only issue of Fire!!, … Continue reading →

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Meet the people behind the books

Posted on August 19, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Today I’m introducing new pages for people and other authors on The Online Books Page. The new pages combine and augment information that’s been on author listings and subject pages. They let readers see in one place books both about … Continue reading →

Posted in data, discovery, libraries, metadata, online books, wikipedia | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Expanding access to current scholarship with JSTOR’s open access books

Posted on March 25, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

We’ve recently added more than ten thousand freely readable recent books from academic publishers to the extended shelves of The Online Books Page. These online titles are provided by JSTOR’s Open Access Books collection, and represent the first large-scale automated … Continue reading →

Posted in metadata, online books, open access, serials, sharing, Uncategorized, university presses | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Expanding access to current scholarship with JSTOR’s open access books

Not by accident, but by action

Posted on March 2, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I didn’t mean to create a sexist library collection when I set out to build one. But in 1994, when I showed Mary the catalog of online books I’d started the previous year, one of her first questions was “Where … Continue reading →

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My thanks to all sharing books online

Posted on July 4, 2023 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Two score and twelve years ago, Michael Hart sat down at a terminal at the University of Illinois and typed in the text of the Declaration of Independence. He shared the file he created with other users of the computer … Continue reading →

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Building a new banned books exhibit for a new era

Posted on September 20, 2022 by John Mark Ockerbloom

When I first created Banned Books Online over 25 years ago, I wasn’t primarily worried about book censorship. I was worried about Internet censorship. It was 1994, and the world at large was just getting to know the Internet, which … Continue reading →

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Public Domain Day 2021: Honoring a lost generation

Posted on January 1, 2021 by John Mark Ockerbloom

It’s Public Domain Day again. In much of Europe, and other countries with “life+70 years” copyright terms, works by authors who died in 1950, such as George Orwell, Karin Michaelis, George Bernard Shaw, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, have joined … Continue reading →

Posted in online books, open access, publicdomain | 3 Comments