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Open Library Project Takes Flight
Aaron Swartz today announced the launch of the new Open Library project. The goal of the project is to produce the world's greatest library on the Internet free for anyone to use. Starting with the Internet Archive's book scanning project and organizing the insertion of new content via a wiki-type model the project seems to be off to a great start. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up today in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.
Hi, Aaron Swartz here. Project Gutenberg is about putting up text versions of out-of-copyright books. This project is about creating a catalog of _every_ book, with links to PG, scans, Amazon.com, PDFs, print on demand, etc. -- anything we can get our hands on. Gutenberg books are in our catalog, of course, but so are millions more.
It's called Wikisource. Mod this article redundant.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
Not enough of a selection? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg: "As of April 2007, Project Gutenberg claimed over 21,000 items in its collection." There has to be something in there. Somehow, I think you're probably not trying hard enough.
She is correct. This is not a 'library' per se but a catalog of books, with links to PG, Amazon, B&N, etc. Most books are NOT free.
The difference between this and other catalogs (Library of Congress, etc.) is that presumably you can customize it more.
By being a listing/index/catalog of all books with references to where to get them instead of being a site dedicated to reproducing the source material of stuff in the public domain, perhaps?
That's what I was thinking. Sounds a lot like what http://www.librarything.com/ already does. Of course, they already have a big head start
Except that they'll also store and supply the books themselves (scanned and/or as text), if available.