(Editor’s Note: This makes two columns in a row for contributing editor Len Edgerly, which is a wonderful beginning for us but nothing compared with the fact that Len just posted his 200th Kindle Chronicles podcast overnight. Congratulations, Mr. Edgerly!)

By LEN EDGERLY, Contributing Editor

Eric Hellman is an engineer, and engineers like to fix problems.

His latest project, unglue.it, aims to fix a very big problem—how public libraries can make eBooks available despite restrictive, outmoded U.S. copyright law.  Any Kindle owner who cares about eBooks and libraries should care about whether he succeeds.

Let’s begin with some background about Eric Hellman.

He holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from Stanford and a Bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Princeton. He was a research scientist for 10 years at Bell Labs, working on nontrivial topics such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy, high-temperature superconductors, gallium nitride and—here’s where we come in—electronic publishing.

Eric founded a company named Openly Informatics Inc., which became a leader in supplying technology, data, and services for library automation, and he sold it to OCLC, the world’s largest cooperative of libraries. His Go to Hellman blog offers lucid, in-depth posts on the intersection of technology, libraries, and eBooks.

If you go to unglue.it you will find the fix he’s trying to work up for libraries. It went live at noon EDT on May 17th.

Libraries, it turns out, are facing a two-fold challenge as they attempt to continue the mission they have fulfilled for the past 200 years.

First, five of the Big Six publishers do not make eBooks available for lending by libraries, and the only one that does, Random House, charges libraries three times more for eBooks than it does for print books.

Second, libraries don’t have a way to acquire eBook versions of the trove of older books that are still protected by copyright. The Google eBooks project’s scanning of 12 million books might have led to a solution, but that initiative is mired in legal challenges that have no end in sight.

For new books published by small publishers, there are commercial networks which libraries can use to loan eBooks, such as Overdrive. For books published in the U.S. before 1923 and other books in the public domain, there is Project Gutenberg. Unglue.it is an attempt to pick up where Project Gutenberg left off, expanding the number of older books that libraries can make available as eBooks.

Here is how unglue.it works:

A participating rights holder and unglue.it decide on fair compensation for release of  a free, Creative Commons-licensed edition of an already published book. A campaign for the book is launched at unglue.it—there are now five up and running—where you can make pledges toward the agreed-upon compensation.  If the goal is reached, pledges will be collected.  Unglue.it will pay the rights holder, who will release an “unglued” eBook edition that anyone will be able to read and share with anyone else, on any device, anywhere in the world.

How is it working so far?

When I spoke with Eric on May 29th  for this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview, he was able to report a gratifying milestone. As of that day, 1,000 people had signed up for free membership at unglue.it . One of the first five books, Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth A. Finnegan, is approaching 40 percent of its $7,500 campaign goal with 20 days to go until the campaign ends at midnight, June 22nd.

Of the other four campaigns, none has generated pledges for more than 3 percent of goal—more on that later.

I pledged $50 to support Oral Literature in Africa, because I can easily imagine the benefit of making it available in eBook form for libraries and schools not only in Africa but around the world. Like NPR, unglue.it offers varying levels of benefits for pledges. If the Oral Literature campaign succeeds, my $50 payment to the rights holder will earn me a listing as a Benefactor.

Few will be familiar with the books selected for the first five unglue.it campaigns. In answer to skepticism on TeleRead about this, Eric Hellman replied: “You’re right, if we can’t offer you books that you’ve ever heard of, it won’t work in the long run. But give us a year or so. In the short run, things happen slower than you expect. In the long run, things change more than we can imagine.”

The reason things change in the long run is that people like Eric Hellman try to fix what isn’t working. “I’m kind of an impatient guy,” he told me. “I’m not holding my breath for Congress to make copyright more rational in the digital age.”

He and his team at Gluejar are learning about the unglue.it market even as they create it. They will be trying new books as rights holders come forward to join the experiment—perhaps poets or authors of books related to this year’s election, or nonprofits with great content to release in return for reasonable crowd-funded compensation.

I think it’s a terrifically inventive, smart initiative, and I hope it succeeds in helping libraries continue their mission for another two centuries. Not to mention all the great DRM-free books it could bring to our Kindles!

Len Edgerly blogs at The Kindle Chronicles where you can hear his interview with Eric Hellman in its entirety at 16:48 of this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast Episode 200.