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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.
The more, the merrier!
I can't wait until all printed books have been scanned into public sites. I'm really into arcane mythology and religion and it is very hard to find original sources, and when you do you can't even check them out because they are so old!
Project Gutenberg has been in the business of hosting public domain books and other literary works for many years, long before either Google or this new thing. Gutenberg is much more of an "Open Source" project in that it is more distributed to volunteers. I wonder if there has been any coordiation between Gutenberg and these "big boy" projects?
They didn't mention the demo site - check out the About the technology page for a summary of ThingDB their new database framework - "a database that could hold tens of millions of records, that would allow random users to modify its entries and keep a full history of their changes, and that would hold arbitrary semi-structured data as users added it. Each of these problems had been solved on its own, but nobody had yet built a technology that solved all three together."
I'm usually not a fan of on-line things trying to faithfully mimic their real-world counterparts. Interface designers do it because they're convinced that their users will be able to seamlessly transfer their real-world skills into using their on-line application, but most of the time the artificial restrictions that are imposed in order to stay faithful to the metaphor limit the actual usefulness of the application.
That said, I kind of like this, page-turning animation and all.
Maybe it's because it's intended to display scans of actual books, and so having them mimic the actual books they're based on makes sense. Plus the addition of search capability is something that a real book doesn't have, but it uses the tools available as an on-line application. I also like the subtle things, like the thickness of the pages on either side changing, so you can judge your position in the book, and the little tabs that help you find your search terms.
It's making me re-think my stance on real-world metaphors in an on-line setting.
Oh, trust me, the various book publishing companies HATE libraries. They're constantly sending lobbyists to Washington in an effort to extract some kind of fees from libraries. So far, the various "library associations" have successfully fought them off. But it's a never ending battle.