First Unglued eBook is available for download

By Press Release

We are pleased to announce the first free ebook release supported by a successful campaign on the Unglue.it crowdfunding platform, which launched in May 2012. It may be downloaded from Unglue.it at https://unglue.it/work/81834/ . Soon you will also be able to download it from your favorite ebook store, and library ebook collections.

Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) has released a revised, digital edition of Ruth Finnegan's classic work of scholarship, Oral Literature in Africa, free for all to read and share under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

With this license, there no limit on the kind of tablet, ereader or computer on which the book can be read, and – perhaps most importantly – no limit on the number of readers and libraries which can download their own copies at the same time.

For the first time, young Africans who may never have known this collection exists, will be able to read this priceless record of the cultures and languages of their grandparents and great-grandparents. An African student in Senegal can hear songs in dialects of languages spoken in Kenya fifty years ago; African-American children in South Carolina can read stories told by the descendants of their Gulah speaking ancestors; and a literary scholar in Cambridge, UK can write a dissertation the oral traditions behind Wole Soyinka's Nobel-prize-winning plays and novels.

Based on research done in the 1960s and first published in 1970, Oral Literature in Africa has been out of print and very hard to find for over a decade.

Now, through the contributions of ungluers from around the world, who raised the goal of $7,500, not only the text but also newly released audio recordings and photographs by Professor Finnegan will be easily accessible to students and scholars around the world.

Print copies of Oral Literature in Africa will be sold by Open Book Publishers through book retailers everywhere, including Kobo, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk – where the free ebook will also be downloadable. The free ebook will be available at libraries and bookstores around the world through Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary (http://openlibrary.org/) and on the Open Book Publisher web site.