When it comes to digitizing books, two stories appear to be unfolding: One is about open source, and the other, Google. Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitize all the world's books and make them universally available. Google was noticeably absent from the cadre of partners, considering that the search behemoth has a high-profile project of its own to scan library books and add them to its searchable index...."We want to digitize all human knowledge...and we can't risk having it privatized," said Doron Weber, an executive of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic organization that has contributed more than $3 million to the Internet Archive since 2003. Citing the importance of an open library for educational purposes, he called on private companies to "rein in their impulses" while urging libraries to "embrace the future." Still, a Google executive in attendance downplayed the perceived rivalry. "I think (the project) is great," said Alexander Macgillivray, Google's senior product counsel, following a presentation on the book-scanning effort. "It's a shame it's being portrayed as a battle between the two projects because the efforts are complementary."...[T]o make the millions of books in the world available online is a Herculean task. Issues of publisher copyrights, data storage and backup, and labor costs must still be hashed out. It would take 6 petabytes to digitally store just 1 million books, according to the Internet Archive. By comparison, Google reportedly has stored nearly 10 million Web documents, requiring between 1.7 and 5 petabytes of storage....Though it has been working on the effort for years, the Internet Archive recently jump-started its effort by introducing the Open Content Alliance....Yahoo and MSN Search are also notable members, given their investments in Web search and driving traffic to their proprietary services. The two companies boasted the openness of the project Tuesday night, but their allegiance to the open-source project surely is a strategic counterbalance to Google's project....Last week, the Internet Archive launched Open Library, a Web site that will eventually house all the world's books, according to the nonprofit. It now demonstrates the project with 15 digitized works....For now, people can download 15 demonstration books from the Open Library site and print them for free at home. Visitors can also purchase bound copies from Lulu.com for $8 each. The service even lets people create their own book covers and art, and then have the books printed with them. Users can search inside the works and see tabs on pages where the terms occurred. With the move of a cursor, visitors can see which page they will turn to before clicking on it. Volunteers from LibriVox, an open-source effort trying to make books freely available in audio, have also made audio recordings of the books so that people can listen to them via the Open Library Web site....[Omitting interesting details on the book-scanning technology.] The Internet Archive currently has 10 scanning machines, but it is ramping up to build 10 more in the next year. "This is one of the great things we've ever done," said Kahle. "It's up there with the Library of Alexandria and putting a man on the moon."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/27/2005 09:03:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
