Open Access News

Brewster Kahle is mobilizing an army of Internet-era scribes who are fastidiously copying books page by page....Mr. Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is guiding a mass-digitization project called the Open Content Alliance, which was announced in October and is rapidly gaining partners. The alliance plans to take carefully selected collections of out-of-copyright books from libraries around the world and turn them into e-books that will be available free to scholars and anyone else who wants to view them, print them, or even download them to their own computers. The project has the backing of Yahoo and Microsoft, and many see it primarily as a response to the controversial book-scanning project led by Google....Although the Open Content Alliance has pledged not to scan copyrighted works without permission, thereby avoiding that thorny legal issue, the project could do as much to shake up the library world as Google's effort has. The alliance's undertaking is more than just a mass-scanning project — it is a new model for cooperation among libraries hoping to build their own digital archives of public-domain materials. Individual libraries have long worked on digitization projects on their own, but the new alliance promises to pool the digital content created by academic libraries. "It's a book-scanning initiative and a vision for an open library," says Mr. Kahle. Indeed, the alliance involves far more players than Google's project: So far 34 libraries, most of them at universities, have agreed to join and contribute material. And the Open Content Alliance will make its digital books more freely available, putting them online in a way that anyone, even companies other than Yahoo and Microsoft, can index and search the files, or even download the books for their own use....One challenge for libraries, of course, is finding the money to scan large quantities of books, even at 10 cents per page. Daniel Greenstein, executive director of the California Digital Library, says he hopes that libraries can contribute to the project by shifting some of the money they now spend on digital-book subscriptions to scanning books and adding them to the shared online collection...."We're going to spend the money anyway," Mr. Greenstein says. "Let's spend it more wisely."...Mr. Kahle says that the books will be given new life in digital form, and that they can be displayed in a number of ways. The archive has developed an on-screen interface that makes it easy to read and search each book. But online users can also request a printed and bound reproduction of a book by paying a small fee to a company that does the printing and binding. Soon the books may be able to be printed in Braille or in large print. They could even be downloaded to PDA's, cellphones, or other portable devices for reading on the go....Google's book-scanning project, meanwhile, is more restricted, and its leaders are far more secretive. Google officials have apparently developed a high-speed book scanner of their own, though they refuse to divulge details of how it works or say how fast it can scan books. Google also will not say how many books it has scanned so far from its partner libraries or even describe the types of books it has added....Google is also less open in the way it presents its books. For those in its collection that are in the public domain, Google allows users to see the full text, but there is no way to download the data or easily print the whole book, features that are allowed by the Open Content Alliance.