The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC have announced plans to reproduce all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed before 1641, online.
“There are no surviving manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays in his handwriting so the quartos are the closest we can get to what Shakespeare really wanted,” said Bodleian spokeswoman Oana Romocea.
“Some quartos do, however, have his annotations around the printed text.”
Many of the quartos are currently only available to scholars and the project is aimed to make the prints more accessible to the general public. The libraries say the downloading of the quartos will begin in April and take about a year to complete.
“We (at the Bodleian) have about 55 copies, although some of them are duplicates,” said Romocea.
“Each quarto is different, so it’s very interesting from a research perspective to compare the quartos.
“For example, some of the famous lines in ‘Hamlet’ exist in one quarto and in another they don’t, or they are very different.”
Result for: libraries
SanDisk has announced a new Sansa MP3 player that will sport no internal memory or screen and will instead use a microSD slot to read slotMusic albums.
The Sansa slotMusic Player is tiny and will run on AAA batteries and will cost just $19.99 USD. Making the launch even more notable is the fact that the player can play any files on a microSD as long as they are MP3 or WMA.
There will be a variety of artists such as Rihanna and Daughtry, ABBA and Elvis available on 1GB microSD cards, each of which will cost $15 USD. The microSD albums will also include album art, and liner notes and usually video content. (Which makes no difference for this player)
The files are DRM-free and can be taken off the cards and added to your music libraries on any PC. Each card also comes with a USB adapter to allow users to take the music off.
At $15 it might be a good idea to buy the card, take the music and then reformat the card to use at your own disposal.
Result for: libraries
CBS Entertainment has announced that it will be adding more classic shows to its CBS.com online video network and its partnering CBS Audience Network sites.
Beginning this morning, full episodes from “The Love Boat”, “Beverly Hills 90210″, “Twin Peaks”, “Family Ties”, and “Perry Mason” were made available on all of CBS’s online video networks and its partners, including CNET, AOL, Microsoft, Comcast, Joost, Sling Media, Veoh, and Bebo.
The broadcaster noted that more content was coming from “one of the largest television programming libraries in the entertainment business” and it seems in the upcoming months the company hopes to add more and more content.
While other broadcasters have made their content available only through certain outlets, CBS is going the other way, allowing its content to be viewed anywhere where there are fans and advertising revenue.
