The Digital Book Index (DBI; http://www.digitalbookindex.com) is a catalog of more than 110,000 e-books, from commercial bestsellers to specialized research documents. The term "book" in the database title is too limiting, because DBI includes an array of textual and graphic content in addition to conventional books. The term "index" is also too modest. "Gateway" and "aggregator" are more accurate, because DBI not only catalogs e-books, it also provides access to a significant portion of the world’s electronic publishing.

DBI erases artificial lines among different types of publishing and treats everything the same—as information. In a typical DBI subject search, a recent trade bestseller, a scholarly university press monograph, a report from a state government agency, and a digitized historical pamphlet will be displayed side by side. This makes DBI valuable for all kinds of research, whether you are a graduate student searching for obscure primary sources or a consumer looking for information on health, travel, or other personal interests.

What’s a Publisher?
DBI lists books from 1,800 publishers, but the term "publisher" doesn’t do justice to the breadth of DBI’s content producers. DBI lists books from hundreds of conventional publishers, including leading trade and technical publishers, dozens of university presses, and hundreds of small publishing houses. It also covers a great range of nonprofit publishing, including books, reports, and studies from federal, state, and local government agencies as well as from universities, organizations, and research groups.

The term "publisher" also covers "digital document creator," which refers to universities and libraries that have digitized their specialized book and document collections and made them publicly available on their Web sites. Finally, DBI lists e-books provided by netLibrary and Questia, two commercial e-book aggregators for academic libraries.

Of DBI’s more than 110,000 e-books, a majority (72,000) are freely available from nonprofit publishers. It’s easy to separate free from fee, because each item record has a price. And, since DBI contains links to the full text of all free documents, it is a giant e-text library, not just a finding tool.

E-Books and More
DBI has selective lists from major trade and technical publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, McGraw-Hill, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ... Tom Franklin, DBI’s founder and director, explains that this is because publishers are unpredictable in their e-publishing practices, which creates uncertainties for independent database producers like DBI. For complete access to current trade and technical e-books, you’ll need to go directly to the publishers’ sites.

DBI’s listings from nonprofit publishers create an immense and diverse treasure trove of valuable (and interesting) public domain content, including ... the Greek and Roman classics to early 20th-century books. Many of these are from Project Gutenberg, but there are thousands more from other organizations that have digitized significant texts and made them publicly available.

DBI reinforces the breadth and importance of government publishing at all levels. This sector produces thousands of mass-appeal, consumer-oriented titles, as well as a large volume of technical material. Much of this content is from well-known federal publishers such as the Food and Drug Administration and the National Library of Medicine, but there is also an extensive collection of books, pamphlets, and how-to literature from state and municipal agencies.

DBI also improves access to content digitization projects, many of which are undertaken by universities and libraries. The varied content of these collections suggests another possible name for DBI—DCI (as in Digital Content Index). Besides monographic literature, the collections contain reports, studies, articles, pamphlets, maps, and photographs.

Searching DBI
DBI has a basic set of search-and-browse options. Users can search by author, title, or keyword (truncated words or character strings within titles). There is no full-text searching; Boolean operators can be used.

There is no date searching or limiting, which would be useful, particularly when you want to separate historical content from recent publications. A DBI record contains author, title, publication date, publisher, price, and a link to the source document that indicates format. A link to a free book takes you directly to the document; links to fee titles take you to the item record on the publisher’s site or to a retailer like eBooks.com. DBI accepts all the major e-content formats, including ASCII, HTML, and PDF as well as Adobe, Microsoft, and Palm Pilot readers. Searchers can browse by publisher and/or subject. DBI’s list of subject categories features nearly 1,000 terms that are arranged hierarchically into two levels.

The DBI site is easy to use. Page layouts are generally clear and uncluttered. Search pages have concise on-screen instructions as well as a short search help section. More information about DBI’s collection development policies and practices would be welcome, however.

DBI is also void of ads and sponsored results, which is due to its strictly non-commercial nature. ... Armed with an extensive background in publishing, [Franklin] saw very early that electronic publishing and distribution of books would reshape the industry. ...

What Is Publishing?
The great breadth of electronic documents in DBI demonstrates that the conventional meanings of "publication" and "publisher" are obsolete. Instead, we now use terms like "content" and "content producer," but this replacement language is not much better.

The vocabulary is still behind the times, since today anyone can use electronic technologies to create and distribute almost any kind of information. Of course, this creates the kind of problem we should want to have, since it means more information is readily available to more people, which is good.

But having more information can mean having more difficulty finding what you want, and this is where DBI comes in and performs a great service. When you are looking for information, you really don’t care about the shades of meaning of the word "content." You want a simple, direct way to get what you need. DBI obliges by abandoning obsolete categories in favor or providing everything you might want.

SYNOPSIS
Digital Book Index (DBI) is a union catalog of e-books and other e-documents from commercial publishers, nonprofit publishers, government agencies, and libraries. It lists more than 110,000 titles, with more than 72,000 of them available for free. Book records contain links to the source item, enabling DBI to function as a giant virtual library.