Back in June of 2011, we made almost all of our PDFs free for downloading, and it understandably got a lot of attention. But lost in the excitement was the fact that we’ve provided our reports for free since 1994 in the form of what we now call the OpenBook, which presents thousands of reports in their entirety for reading online.

Today, we’re excited to launch a new version of the OpenBook, where the purpose of the new look was to remove as much as we could so that the reading experience is as easy as possible. Instead of clicking through a book page-by-page, you’ll now scroll through chapters. The table of contents is available at any time, and you still go back and forth by page or jump to any individual page, but the emphasis is now on its primary purpose: reading our reports.

Give it a try. Go to page one of The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, chapter 7 of A Framework for K-12 Science Education, the introduction in On Being A Scientist, or search for another book. The OpenBook is available for almost all of the books published by NAP, so look for the “Read Online” button on each book’s page to start reading.

A few tips: you can share any page of any book using the paper airplane icon, and copying the address will give you a link back to the exact page you’re on. You can save bookmarks and notes with a MyNAP account. You can also switch back and forth between the original text as it appears in the print book, or a text version that’s optimized for web reading.

And maybe the best thing? It’s now much easier on the eyes when you’re reading on your tablet or mobile. We’re biased, but we think it’s as good of a reading experience as any e-reader out there.

One more thing: we’ve added a little Feedback button to the bottom of the page. If you have any thoughts at all on the OpenBook, please take a second to let us know your suggestions and experience. We thrive on feedback.

Happy reading!

We’re always looking for ways that we can improve the experience of browsing, reading, and researching on NAP.edu, so it’s great to hear from frequent visitors about how they use the site and changes they’d like to see. Recently, we took some feedback and moved a few things around on the catalog page (the primary page for each book on NAP.edu).

First up are the share tools, which allow you to share to social networks and other places around the web with a single click. They used to be at the very bottom of the page, but we were hearing that they were a little hard to find there, so they will now appear along the very right hand side of the page when you’re viewing the site on a desktop computer and as a grey “Share” bar at the bottom of the page when you’re looking at a tablet or smartphone.

Another move that we made were the links to embed a book into your website or to email the page to a friend. That also used to be in that hard-to-find share bar at the bottom of each page, but will now be at the top of the right column in each page.

Last but definitely not least is the citations, where you can quickly copy and paste a citation to a book or download the citation in BibTeX, EndNote, or RefMan formats. The link to this used to be in the upper right column, but its now lost its “manager” title (it’s a lateral move) and has been moved it into the bottom of the “Overview” tab of each book.

If you want to see these changes in action, check them out on one of our newer releases. And if you have any comments on the changes or other suggestions on ways we could improve the website, feel free to send us feedback about what you’d like to see.

There are thousands of National Academies reports to browse on nap.edu, and more publications are being added all the time. In 2012, we published an average of six new books a week on dozens of science topics. We offer an email list and RSS feed to keep up with what’s new, but did you know that we have a single page that lists all the new reports added to the website in the last 30 days? Frankly, we haven’t called a lot of attention to it because it hasn’t been much to look at. Until today.

We’ve given that page–New Titles from the National Academies Press–a complete makeover. Now, you can check out what’s new on nap.edu at a glance. Some of the improvements on our new “New” page:

• Download, read, or add to cart with one click. Want to learn more about the book first? Click on the cover or the title to look at the book’s catalog page, where you can read the full description, the table of contents, and other info about the book.
• Sorted by date. Our previous page listed the last 30 days of releases in alphabetical order. Now, books are listed in the order they’re released, with the newest books appearing at the top the very moment they’re available online. Also, you can see that release date right below the cover.
• Prepublication or final book? Did you know that many of our books get released twice? When the National Academies issues a new report, we often post a “prepublication version” to make those findings public immediately. Later, after the content and design are finalized, we put the finished book online in its place. Now, you can see whether the book we have online is a “prepub,” as we call it here, or the final version. Titles that are released in this way will appear on the “New” page both times–so you’ll know when your favorite new report “goes final” as soon as it happens.

If that page doesn’t turn up a report that interests you, use our search box at the top of the page, which we’ve moved over to the right side of the header and made a little bigger.

What do you think? Send us your thoughts on the New Titles page or anything else that you’d like to see on nap.edu.