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Open Library Goes Online With Public Domain Books
mrcgran writes "A competitor to Google Book Search emerges as the Yahoo-backed Open Content Alliance launches an 'open library' of its own. After several years of scanning and archiving, the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance this week unveiled the Open Library, their attempt at bringing public domain books to the masses. The Internet Archive has hosted texts for quite some time, but the Open Library makes fully-searchable, high-quality scans of books available, along with downloadable PDFs. It offers an experience designed to match paper: there's even a page-flipping animation as readers move forward and backward through the book. Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that when it comes to presentation, 'they already have Google beat, even with recent upgrades to the [Google Book Search] system including a plain text viewing option.'" We have previously discussed this project, though this is a bit more complete rundown on the initiative.
My Nokia 770 solved all of those for me...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Gutenberg is the actual text of the book, this is the scan of the orginal print.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Well, PG and DP (Distributed Proofreaders) have had various working relationships with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive for a LONG time. Nothing specifically about this open library (though they will/do have PG stuff in their library).
The majority of their stuff is the scanned image sets, which dovetails nicely with DP and PG, in that it can be converted into a nicely proofed set of text by the folks over there (www.pgdp.net). Scans are pretty and useful in their way, but having the proofed text makes it infinitely more portable and useful (imo).
JHutch
Quite impressive indeed.
I think the problem is usually a combination of 2 things...bad metaphors implemented badly.
A well chosen and suitable metaphor combined with quality execution usually seems to work well.
In this case, the metaphor is sound: Present the user with a book to...read a book. Good metaphor. Next is the execution, which is very good. Click a page...page turns. Very intuitive. Page flipping animation makes it totally obvious what is happening, whether flipping back or forward. Stacked page thickness gives visual cue as to where in the book you are, just as in rw.
Unfortunately, this kind of interface is without a doubt an exception to the norm. It's altogether way too rare to find this quality of an interface...especially in a web page.
Bonus points for that, and in markup no less! (Look ma! No flash! No Java!)
Kudos to the developers on a job very well done!
No Comment.
I'm skeptical about the usefulness of that. There's nothing I hate more than having to wait for some animation before I can read more content.
You could stop complaining and actually go try it, you know. It is free.
The page flipping thing is pretty instantaneous. Backwards and forwards.
Gutenberg is the raw text. This is actual scans of the pages, incl illustrations. Looks far more like a real book.
Brewster (IA) and Raj Reddy (CMU) and others have been working on this for almost a decade now, the Internet Archive bookmobile has been printing/binding books on demand at schools across the world for more than 5 years. They actually approached google about joining them before google launched their own project. While Brewster has made attempts to overturn the Sonny Bono copyright extension law (a couple made it to the supreme court, but ultimately failed), he generally doesn't like to push the envelope when it comes to copyright infringement, so much so that he has been accused of being a patsy. Which is really sad, as he has spent a whole lot of his own money and hours making more data freely available than probably anyone in the history of man!
The Open Library is a Brewster Kahle project. Brewster envision, built, and funded the Internet Archive. He has been scanning books for a decade (with Raj Reddy of CMU) this project predates Google's by several years. He approached Google when he started expanding the Text Archive beyond the Gutenberg collection (which the Internet Archive was hosting), but Google wanted to do their own thing, one that would be more profitable to them, so he got funding from other sources. He invented WAIS, which was one of the first internet searches (it indexed FTP, Gopher, and early HTTP sites). In 95 he donated a relatively huge and expensive hard drive to the project which saved the only copies of the earliest usenet postings which were on rapidly deteriorating tapes. He has repeatedly challenged the DMCA and Sonny Bono copyright extension in partnership with Lawrence Lessig. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Unlike Google, there are no ads on any archive.org hosts other than the ones that were originally in the pages that are archived. As for what is wrong with Google's approach, they make gobs of money and never once offered any of it to the people who pay (either in money or time) to create the content. Brewster's goal is "Universal Access to all Knowledge", he doesn't need to say "do no evil", as he believes that goes without saying. He has done all of this while asking for nothing in return. So trust google if you want, I know Brewster and trust him.
As for searching, the text of the books is indexed and searchable, if you want to do a general search inside the book, you can use google, who usurps the rights of the authors, or you could use Amazon who only surfaces the texts that the rights owners have allowed to be indexed.
BTW A major coder for google while it was google.stanford.edu, was writing much of that code while working for Brewster at Alexa. There are rumors about the cleanliness of that code, but Brewster was never concerned about any of this, nor the fact that egroups, which started on another machine on the Alexa network, sold to Yahoo for $500 Million.
No DRM, just fancy-ass AJAX page-turning effects. You can still download a version of the book or grab individual pages with no problems (they're scanned pages).
This is a sig. Deal with it.