In June, nicely timed just before the American Library Association’s Annual Conference, Gluejar announced their first “unglued” title: “Oral Literature in Africa”. Well, now it is available for downloading in several different formats:

You can also read it online using the Internet Archive’s book reader. It should be pointed out that this is a new second edition of this work, not simply the first edition republished online. There is additional content as well as photographs that were not in the original.

This success comes at a time when Gluejar’s efforts have been temporarily thwarted by Amazon Payments forcing them to stop using their service for crowdsourcing payments to copyright holders. Gluejar employees cagily avoid speculating as to why, but I’m far enough removed to posit that Amazon felt like the effort, should it prove successful, was bound to undermine their business model. But whatever, Gluejar has been investigating other options and will likely be back online accepting donations soon.

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