NASA Quietly Building an eBook Empire

NASA is the US government agency responsible for space exploration and designing new technologies to achieve it. They have seen better days, since they have abandoned space shuttle launches and instead rely on the ISS in Russia to provide access to the International Space Station. Due to the complicated political landscape with Russia, Space X is hoping to leverage their reusable rockets and take over manned missions.  The one thing NASA is not known for is digital publishing, and the agency is quietly building an eBook empire. NASA eBooks has been an ongoing project that started in the last decade. They have two different repositories, one that is mainly available in PDF and has hundreds of titles and a more optimized library that is more heavily promoted. NASA eBooks is a new initiative that only has 16 titles, but most of them are fairly accessible and deal with broad subject matter. They are all 100% free and are available in EPUB, MOBI and PDF formats. This basically allows them to be read on any e-reader, tablet or smartphone. The new eBook system NASA employs deals with titles printed from 2009-2014, which half of the list being very current. You can learn about the new F-18 research or the evolution of the Russian Space Agency.  My favorite, which was released recently is  Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication and edited by SETI Director of Interstellar Message Composition Douglas Vakoch, the document draws on “issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology” to prepare us “for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come.” NASA does not sell or distribute their eBooks on any other platform, such as Amazon or Kobo. Instead, you have to download it directly from their website in the format of your choice.  This is a great resource for people looking to pursue an aeronautics career or solid resources for teachers.  For everyone else, there are few really cool titles on how the Hubble Telescope got built or how NASA is testing drones. NASA Quietly Building an eBook Empire is a post from: Good e-Reader

URL: http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/nasa-quietly-building-an-ebook-empire?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nasa-quietly-building-an-ebook-empire