Suggestions wanted: High-school ebooks

[elf]

My daughter's high school has no library. (Insert appropriate noises of horror.) It's a tiny charter school in the middle of Oakland; even if it had funds for a library (it doesn't) or could get donations, it doesn't have space for one. It does, however, have a resource center & computers for the kids to use, and most of the kids have computers at home.

I want to make it a library of ebooks. (Legal, legit ebooks; no shady stuff.) I want something other than "here is the entire collection of English-language books from Gutenberg," because the kids aren't going to use that any more from a disc than they do now, which is to say, not at all.

I'm looking for suggestions & recommendations for this. Ebooks, software (Calibre? Stanza? Firefox-and-EPUBreader, loaded portably so kids can copy-paste the whole set to take home?), other ideas.

It's an inner-city Oakland school; interest in DWEM authors is low. Willing to contact authors & publishers to seek permission for ebook use; not willing to bother with DRM... I'm limiting this to "kids can freely share, copy, distribute these ebooks to their friends & family."

While I'm willing to take suggestions for academic resources (I know there's free textbooks in various places online), I'm more interested in collecting books the kids will (or might) read on their own, or could reasonably be assigned as classroom reading. (So, not looking for titles like "Biology for 10th graders." Except maybe to point out to the school that they exist.) Especially looking for good nonfic (biography, histories, essays) 'cos I know I'll have no trouble rounding up swarms of fiction; I just have to pare that down to stuff that's teen-appropriate.

Suggestions, anyone? Brainstormish thoughts--other things to keep in mind?

Comments

[isis]

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is a YA freely distributed ebook. (All his stuff is - I don't know what, other than this one, is appropriate for HS kids.) You can find his works on feedbooks.com and on his site.

[elf]

Doctorow's works are high on the list to be included. Little Brother and FTW are both officially YA (and daughter & her friends approve of both); "Content" could be reasonable nonfic; I probably have to discuss with the school what else is reasonable.

I'd love to include both "Little Brother" and "1984," but the latter's not public domain in the US. (However, it is in Canada--which means it's easy to acquire--and I'm not adverse to writing letters to publishers to ask for permission to distribute to high school students. I do have some doubts about them agreeing to it, though.)

[samvara]

Oooh, oooh, the Baen Free Library - they have some authors putting up examples of their works.

Norton, Bujold, Lackey, Lisle, Moon (despite Recent Events) and Schmitz are all on my recommend to kids list.

[elf]

I need to talk to the school about which Baen free books would be reasonable; I have no idea if there'd be parental outcry about any of them. (It's one thing to have them freely available on the web; it's another to have them in a small set specifically handed to students.)

And I'll contact Baen, at some point when I have a better idea what I'm doing, about permissions for some of the books that aren't in the library. I know that we could use any of the books from the CDs, but I think it'd be niftier to have specific permission--and I think Baen is generous enough with ebooks that it's not unlikely that they'd be happy to have more of their books included in a digital school library.

[trialia]

If you're at all worried about homophobia on this subject, I would probably suggest avoiding Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, specifically (it's not a homosexual-males-only planet, just males-only, but some parents would most likely kick up at its premise). Also Shards of Honor would probably be counted too adult for a high-school library, given some of the content. The Warrior's Apprentice is YA, though.

[elf]

Not worried about homophobia, or at least, not any more than the general worries. There are openly GBLT (well, gay & lesbian) students at the school, possibly some students have two same-sex parents; I want to make sure to include things that let those kids know there's books that don't pretend they don't exist.

If I could include Harlequin romances in the collection, I could include a selection of GBLT romances of the same level of explicitness. And while there's no comparable lines to Harlequin, there are plenty of friendly GBLT-romance authors who'd be happy to give a couple of titles to a library. Even an ebook share-at-will library.

Ethan of Athos would probably be a great book for the collection--lots of gay people, lots of gay marriage, and no sex. The gay aspects are folded into the sci-fi adventure story. (Shards of Honor too adult? No idea. Will be running list past librarians & teachers/admin at the school before I get too far; that's an area I have no judgment in.)

[st_aurafina]

I think Neil Gaiman has some of his material up for download on his site. (I just checked his site: there's short stories here, otherwise it seems to be mostly excerpts and study guides. But I think he changes it up, it might be worth keeping an eye out.) Contacting authors is a really good idea.

I'd definitely recommend Calibre for its ability to convert between formats - that might be handy if you're going to have a few different kinds of e-readers. If there's aren't a lot of e-readers around, but there are kids with phones? Stanza on the iPhone is free, and it's easy to use.

[elf]

No e-readers. Lots of phones, but I don't expect many of the kids to want to read books on their phones. Mostly to be read on computers.

I think I want to start with a list of books that I can use free & clear (Baen library, anything with a CC license, public domain stuff), and then sort out what might be worth contacting authors over.

I'll also put together a list of links, for books that can be freely downloaded but not legally distributed by other people.

[trialia]

I don't know, I do - and I would've at their age, had I had a phone capable of it. They're easier to carry about and remember not to leave places than paperbacks. Besides which, everyone does keep saying the younger generation are more into tech than those of us who came before. (I'm 24, FWIW. *g*)

I use my Android phone to read ebooks as well as my laptop; I use Calibre to organise my files and transfer them to the phone via USB, and I have the free app Aldiko on my phone to read them and organise them there.

[elf]

I definitely want to include phone-able books (it's not like that's any real difficulty to add to the project); I just want to make sure that I don't focus on the expectation that they'll read on phones. And I know a lot of the students have phones; I don't know if that's 25% or 75% or all but a handful.

Not all will be ebookable. Or some will only be sort-of ebookable; they might read txt books only. I'm up to doing a bit of research about phone apps; not up to trying to make a comprehensive list. And what I remember from reading on a PDA (which I did very happily for two years) was that the battery kept dying mid-chapter; most phones (other than iPhones) aren't designed for hours and hours of constant activity.

People who enjoy reading will read on phones; I'm not sure how much people will learn to enjoy reading by getting books on phones. (However, can see kids arguing "hey, I'm not texting--I'm reading. Gotta let me use my cellphone after I finish my classwork.")

(School needs to deal with the issue of techtoy-as-educational-device soon.)

[trialia]

Well, the industry standard is .epub, so if you get them in that, they'll read in Calibre, Aldiko, Stanza and almost any other form you choose to try. :)

My battery doesn't die mid-chapter; I get a good half-hour's warning.

[elf]

I've got vague plans to offer the books in four formats:

• Letter-sized PDF, so they can be printed, or parts can be (also, because a lot of publications are available at that size),
• Roughly half-letter-sized PDF that's easier to read on computer screens, and a lot of paperbacks are offered as free ebooks that way,
• ePub, and
• txt.

That should cover common reading software & easy conversion ability, and txt is the fallback format for "what*ever* device you have, you can get this book onto it." (I don't know if I'll come up with nifty macros to convert bold & italics to *bold* and _italics_, but I might.)

I don't like PDF as an ebook format, but I know that the kids know how to use those, and that most of this reading will be done on desktop computers.

(I kept ignoring the half-hour warning 'cos I can read a lot in half an hour, and then it'd die in the middle of whatever I was reading. I didn't want to stop at the half-hour mark 'cos by that time it was generally evening and I knew that once I put it on the charger, I was done for the night.)