Wally Kahn & BGA UK eBook Collection

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THE DREAM To professionally scan all out of print UK gliding books and create an eBook library. The intention is that the BGA will have an accessible, catalogued hard copy gliding library and eventually the BGA website will host all the scanned UK gliding magazines and the eBook library. Both magazines and eBooks will be searchable and freely available. We are grateful for the support from the people on the right who have nearly made this dream possible. Their names and clubs will be on a "Roll of Honour" fastened to the new book cases at BGA HQ.

 THE HISTORY. Over 150 unique UK gliding books have been collected by Wally Kahn over many years and it is the heart of the ‘UK Gliding Library’ that is now being assembled. Wally generously decided to gift his collection to the BGA so that it could be combined with the BGA collection. The BGA are delighted to accept this opportunity. The original BGA collection is still stored in boxes and was gifted to the BGA by Doc Slater who collected over 400 books from world wide sources, mainly on aviation related subjects with a proportion purely on gliding. The BGA is planning to create an accessible library which will be held in the BGA headquarters at Leicester.

Combining the collections, plus a gift of a few more to the project, takes the UK gliding book collection up to 169 unique books. It is probable that all the books on the subject of gliding published in the UK are listed below, if you spot a UK published one we haven't got please email Peter Redshaw or Wally Kahn with the details. Geoff Moore, Tom Edwards, Peter Charatan and Ged Terry have pointed us at 7 additional UK books.

Having established a physical and comprehensive library the next target is to scan as many of these UK books that are out of print as is possible and convert them into eBooks. The BGA has agreed to host them on their BGA/Sailplane and Gliding website when they upgrade their website facility. The aim is to make them easily searchable, freely available (within copyright rules) and retain them for posterity. If you have any ideas or comments on this please send them to Peter Redshaw.

In certain cases, due to copyright rules, we may only be able to provide digital extracts from some of the books. In this situation we hope to provide enough digital content that should you subsequently wish to purchase the books, the eBooks or sample eBooks will give you a very good idea of the content to aid your choice. Many are still available from online book shops but they fail to provide enough information to aid your choice.

EXECUTION. It requires funds to scan these books and do it professionally. The magazines were scanned for free and judging from the number of magazine downloads that are being made, you obviously enjoy reading them. We hoped that you would therefore share our dream and contribute to this UK gliding eBook library and archive. This you have done and we passed the £10000 target early May 2011, many thanks to those listed on the right.

A separate account inside the Lakes Gliding Club's bank account, named "The Kahn/BGA eBook Library" account is safely holding the funds. ALL monies raised will go towards scanning. Should for some reason the project stop in the middle, scanning liabilities will be paid from funds, residual money will be returned to the donors in proportion to their generosity. Achieved scanning work will be given to the BGA.

Wally very generously set the ball rolling with a donation of £2000 and the gift to the BGA of his magnificent UK gliding book collection. It is only fitting that we should thus refer to the eventual digital library of UK gliding books as the "Wally Kahn Collection". If you would like to be part of this project or think you can help, please contact Peter Redshaw or Wally Kahn.

THE BOOKS.  Our first eBook was, Wally Kahn, A Glider Pilot bold.. (3rd edition) The list of 169 UK books is sorted by author. Progress is being made, we now have 30 eBooks, highlighted on the list in green. Right click on the title to 'save as' and download the book, note that some are large files. In order to open the PDF documents, Adobe Reader (version 8 or later) will need to be installed on your PC. To download the latest copy of this software go to http://www.adobe.com/products/reader.html  An alternate and sometimes better software for reading the PDF files is Foxit Reader, this is free and available at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader Use Foxit Reader if Adobe is not opening the pictures properly.

Copyright of this page is that of The Lakes Gliding Club, Wally Kahn and the BGA, no use other than personal use should be made of these documents without written permission of all parties. They are not to be amended or used on other websites.

Copyright of the eBooks. A number of books are clearly outside copyright, however, every effort is being made to trace the authors, publishers and descendants of these books to seek approval to use copyrighted material. The scanned material as eBooks remain the copyright of  the many people who gave their permission to convert the individual books to eBooks and “The Wally Kahn/BGA eBook Library” who are doing the scanning. The gliding movement thanks you.

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