The Open Access world has been presented to 3 new books on the subject. Peter Suber talked a little about them on his blog.

1. E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (eds.), Science Dissemination using Open Access, a new book published under a CC-NC-ND license by the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, July 2008.
   

   The book knits together pieces from many sources into a single narrative.  (Disclosure:  some of the pieces are mine.)  It's available as a downloadable PDF (4.74 MB, 196 pp.) or an online edition in an ebook viewer with turning pages.

   
   

   From today's announcement:

   
   

   
   

   The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

   
   

   The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

   
   

   
   


2. Barbara Malina (ed.), Open Access Opportunities and Challenges:  A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008.  A 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors.  (Thanks to Napoleon Miradon.)
   

   This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen - ein Handbuch, which the German UNESCO Commission published on June 6, 2007.

   
   


3. If you count Kylie Pappalardo's Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00013935/01/Microsoft_Word_-_Final_Draft_-_website.pdf), Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project, June 2008, a very comprehensive 150 pp. guide for authors, then that's three books on OA in three days.

(from Peter Suber's Open Access News: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/07/another-book-on-oa.html)