Free Ebook Foundation Programs: Unglue.it.

Unglue.it launched in 2012 with a focus on sustainable funding models for freely-licensed ebooks. Since then, it has worked to improve the access and distribution of these books by building a database of over 30,000 Creative Commons licensed ebooks, and has incorporated over 70,000 public domain books via GITenberg. More than eight million ebooks have been downloaded via Unglue.it!

Unglue.it pioneered the concept of using crowdfunding to bring copyrighted books into the public commons, and tested the concept of using ebook sales to advance a trigger date for a Creative Commons license. Unglue.it also offers creators the ability to accept "Thanks" payments from grateful readers of their free-licensed ebooks. Among the works that became Creative Commons licensed via Unglue.it are:

• Oral Literature in Africa
• So You Want to Be a Librarian
• Biodigital
• Feeding the City
• Without a Net
• Issues in Open Research Data
• Complex Predicates
• Tales of Darkness and Light: Soso Tham’s The Old Days of the Khasis
• As the Bandit Will I Confess You

In addition to books added individually via the unglue.it website, unglue.it uses automation and works with a number of organizations to build the catalog of free ebooks. Books from Project Gutenberg are added via GITenberg, while books from Directory of Open Access Books are added using their OAI API. It adds books from many other sites using automated methods.

It's better to give than to receive, even when it's metadata. Unglue.it supports export of its catalog in a number of industry standard formats, including ONIX, MARC, and OPDS. New York Public Library uses OPDS to include books from the Unglue.it catalog in the SimplyE app, available for Android and iPhone. Information about Unglue.it data export is at https://unglue.it/api/help

The Unglue.it website is written in Python and is based on the Django web application framework. All the code used to run it is Free Open Source Software, and can be viewed, forked, and contributed to on Github.

Try out Unglue.it yourself! Or visit the Unglue.it FAQ to learn more.