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Gutenberg Bibles Online
Richey writes: "The British Library is making the Gutenberg Bible, the first major bible printed in the West available online. (Direct link to the book)." This isn't the first high-res copy of the Gutenberg Bible online; a German university library has already done it with their copy, but it's still cool. Update: 11/23 8:25 AM by michael : For the people that skipped those boring history classes, this was the first book printed in the western world with movable type, a huge leap in printing technology.
This isn't just some religious thing. The Gutenberg Bible is important because it was the first book printed with moveable type in the West (The Chinese Empire actually had a moveable type several centuries prior, but as with their invention of gunpowder, they failed to use it effectively -- they were sort of the Xerox PARC of civilizations, I guess).
The thing about moveable type is that it made books afffordable. Like the Internet, it suddenly made a lot of information available to people.
Think laterally here folks!
This is a very useful, very important use for the internet. You are looking at very high resolution images across the internet of a unique book.
OK so this may not be big news for folks whose idea of important books are the latest O'Reilly's a whole 30 minutes away in your nearest bookshop.But for historians, academics, subject specialists, this means potential desktop access to a whole library of significant works that could previously only be accessed by flying 3000 miles to see. Not all of these have been previously accessible via high resolution facsimile copies, and besides, the facsimile copies that do exist are often very expensive themselves and rare enough (they don't do Harry Potter style print runs of 12th century works...)
This is very good news for historians.