State’s foreign policy compendium, now in e-book form
lectroidmarc/AP
By
Joseph Marks
The agency released 108 volumes of its documentary history on Monday.
Want to read NSC-68 on your Kindle 3G or parse the “Long Telegram” without a long delay? Wait no more.
The State Department’s Office of the Historian released 108 volumes of its mammoth Foreign Relations of the United States series in e-book form Monday.
This first release is a pilot and many more volumes will come out soon, the office said.
The volumes are readable on Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad as well as several other e-readers and tablets. Unlike Web versions of famous documents, most e-readers allow users to bookmark and annotate texts as they could with a paper version.
Federal agencies are increasingly releasing major documents in more user friendly formats including e-books. The Government Printing Office offers more than 200 titles, including the federal budget, in e-book form.
The Foreign Relations of the United States is one of the main public products produced by the historian’s office. It is essentially a full and annotated documentary history of various topics in U.S. foreign relations, such as the Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment from 1945 to 1950.
The historian’s office is seeking public feedback on the e-book project at the email: history_ebooks@state.gov. The office will post updates on new volumes and other information on Twitter at @HistoryAtState.