<p><ahref="http://unglue.it">Unglue.It</a> is a service provided by <ahref="http://gluejar.com">Gluejar, Inc.</a> It's a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific ebooks and other types of digital content by paying rights holders to relicense their works under <ahref="http://creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a> licenses.</p>
<p>What does this mean?</p>
<ul>
<li>Book-lovers and libraries everywhere can join together to set books free.</li>
<li>Authors and publishers get the compensation they deserve.</li>
<li>Books that are out of print, not available as ebooks, or otherwise hard to enjoy will be available for everyone to read, share, learn from, and love -- freely and legally.</li>
<divclass="text"><b>Eric Hellman</b>, President of Gluejar, is a technologist, entrepreneur, and writer. After 10 years at Bell Labs in physics research, Eric became interested in technologies surrounding e-journals and libraries. His first business, Openly Informatics, developed OpenURL linking software and knowledgebases, and was acquired by OCLC in 1996. At OCLC, he led the effort to productize and expand the xISBN service, and began the development of OCLC's Electronic Resource Management offerings. After leaving OCLC, Eric began blogging at <ahref="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com">Go To Hellman</a>. He covers the intersection of technology, libraries and ebooks, and has written extensively on the Semantic Web and Linked Data.</div>
<divclass="text"><b>Amanda Mecke</b> is an expert in literary rights management. Before founding her own <ahref="http://www.ameckeco.com/">literary agency</a>, Amanda was VP, Director of Subsidiary Rights for Bantam Dell, a division of Random House Inc. from 1989-2003, where she led a department that sold international and domestic book rights and pioneered early electronic licenses for subscription databases, CD-ROMs, audiobooks, and ebooks. She was also a co-leader of the Random House/SAP Contracts and Royalties software development team. Prior to joining Bantam Dell, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press. While there she served the board of the American Association of University Presses and was President of Women in Scholarly Publishing. Amanda has been a speaker at the Frankfurt Book Messe Rights Workshop, NYU Summer Publishing Program, American Independent Writers conference, and the International Women’s Writers Guild. She has a B.A. from Pitzer College, Claremont, California and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Amanda will continue to represent original work by her literary agency clients.<br/><br/>
Although our founding team will be be playing many roles at once, Amanda will be spending much of her time reaching out to rights holders and identifying works that will attract financial support from book lovers who want to see the ebooks available for free to anyone, anywhere. Her experience in both trade and academic publishing, together with her keen insight into the world of book rights, stood her above a lot of great people who expressed interest in working for Gluejar.</div>
<divclass="text"><b>Raymond Yee</b> is a data architect, author, consultant, and teacher. He is author of the leading book on web mashups, <ahref="http://blog.mashupguide.net/2008/02/29/the-book-is-available-now/">Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services</a> (published by Apress and licensed under a Creative Commons license), and has numerous blogs at his <ahref="http://raymondyee.net/">personal site</a>. At the UC Berkeley School of Information, he taught Mixing and Remixing Information, a course on using APIs to create mashups. An open data and open government afficionado, he recently co-wrote three influential reports on how the US government can improve its efforts to make data and services available through APIs. Raymond served as the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project (a widely used open source research tool) and managed the <ahref="http://www.archive.org/details/zoterocommons">Zotero Commons</a>, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive. Raymond has been an invited speaker about web technology at the Library of Congress, Fashion Institute of Technology, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, American Library Association, the Open Education conference, Code4lib, Educause, and NISO. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to middle and high school students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. Raymond is an erstwhile tubaist, admirer of J. S. Bach, and son of industrious Chinese-Canadian restaurateurs.<br/><br/>
At Gluejar, the interfaces we will expose to other websites and the data mash-ups we'll support will be just as important as the website itself. Expect that any webpage -- book blog, Facebook page, or library online catalog -- will be able to combine book data and user interaction with the effort of nudging the book towards Open Access. Raymond's expertise will make this possible.</div>
<divclass="text"><b>Andromeda Yelton</b> is former Latin teacher and recent library science graduate (with a background in mathematics) who's quickly made a name for herself in the library world. She has a BA in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an MA in Classics from Tufts, and recently completed her MLS from Simmons. She blogs at <ahref="http://andromedayelton.com/">Across Divided Networks</a> and at <ahref="http://www.alatechsource.org/blog">ALA TechSource</a>, and won the 2010 <ahref="http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaresources/litascholarships/exlibris/index.cfm">LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award</a> for the article "A Simple Scheme for Book Classification Using Wikipedia". She is a 2011 American Library Association <ahref="http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/ala-announces-2011-emerging-leader-participants">Emerging Leader</a>.
Andromeda was one of the leaders of the crowdsourced philanthropy project <ahref="http://buyindiaalibrary.wordpress.com/">Buy India a Library</a>. She also has first-hand experience with public broadcasting- she was once a <ahref="http://andromedayelton.com/2009/12/how-to-get-carl-kasells-voice-on-your-home-answering-machine/">listener contestant</a> on <ahref="http://www.npr.org/programs/wait-wait-dont-tell-me/">Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me</a>.</div>
