Brewster Kahle has always liked books. His new initiative, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) , is all about books: digitizing, tagging, indexing, converting and serving using different formats for different audiences, even moving them back into printed book format. The partnership was announced at a reception October 25 at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, just up the hill from Kahle's nonprofit archive.org which now houses the largest database in the world (the N.S.A. has not responded to that claim).
I arrived early and found his Internet bookmobile parked outside, the automatic VSAT dish slowly inching its way across the sky to find a connection with the satellite that connects to the library of books Kahle has already managed to put online. Stacks of printed sheets lay near the paper cutter and binder waiting to be bound. Inside the caterers had set up at the back wall, and along the windows facing San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge were seven demo stations for some of the partners in the alliance.
The Open Library is the best place to start. Click on one the titles and a high-res version of the book appears. You can search on key words for some titles ("An International Episode") and each hit is marked with a tab which shows the word in context as your mouse passes over it. A new company called Lulu will even print, bind, and ship one copy of the book to you. The number of books in the collection is growing through support from some foundations (Sloan) and support from companies like Microsoft's MSN which will underwrite the scanning of 150,000 titles. Today's news headlines make it seem like Microsoft is guiding the whole effort (Pravda: "Microsoft to digitize the world's book") Other companies in the public-private partnership include HP, Adobe, and Yahoo (whose exec. felt the need to talk about a librarian who kicked him out of the school library for being noisy). Many libraries are taking part in this alliance: University of California, Smithsonian, and a disproportionate number of Canadian academic libraries. The Smithsonian has enough influence to get support for a wonderful project called the Bio-diversity Heritage Library which will involve other libraries in the U.K. and U.S. with great collections of material on plants and animals.
While Google was not mentioned at all during the presentation, this alliance is very careful to include publishers and others who control content and are worried about the Google model where the company is scanning and archiving under what they consider to be the fair use doctrine. The OCA may be a difficult group to move in the same direction, but if they can, they will probably stay out of court--unlike Google and the authors and publishers who are suing the company.
There were smaller non-profits showing interesting niche applications. LibriVox is a very new ad hoc effort by Hugh McGuire of Montreal to encourage people to make voice recordings of public domain works and post them. At present there are just a few titles (Call of the Wild and The Road to Oz being my top choices), but he has a growing list of volunteers working on other projects. Another that is well supported and has been working for several years is Benetech. Janice Carter, head of literacy programs, was showing the service for the blind in America, bookshare, a bookreader that provides access to thousands of public domain and copyrighted titles which are available because of a legal requirement for publishers to make works available to this group. There is a $50 subscription fee, but many of the blind have access through other institutions, so they need not be excluded.
Kahle showed a photo of Ugandan kids gathered around the Internet bookmobile and stressed that he has a goal of making books available to everyone, even those without Internet access (about 88% of the world at last count. I helped in a small way at the onset of the Uganda project, and a source close to the principal librarian in Kampala said the project had run out of money and was not running. I have not confirmed this, but it follows the path of many well-meaning high tech projects in developing countries. In unconnected areas and in places where even electricity is in short supply and is costly, electronic books may not make much sense. Print on demand books might be a decent compromise if there is no resources for small public libraries. Where I taught in Togo the cost of light after dark was prohibitive, and in the capital school kids would study by street lights. Kahle has high hopes for projects such as the Hundred dollar laptop as a tool for extending access to some tiers of society.
Recent Comments