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Open Library Goes Online With Public Domain Books

Posted by Zonk on from the shakespeare-and-company dept.

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.

4 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Gutenberg Project by Bananatree3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  2. Check out the demo site by slashd'oh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."

  3. Moon Books for DS by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Have they solved the actual problems that plague online book sites? You know, lack of portability, bulkiness, ability to read on the toilet easily, and the ability to lend to friends at the drop of a hat? Are those solved yet? Yes. If you buy a Nintendo DS ($130) and a Datel Games n' Music adapter ($35), you can read text files while sitting on the toilet. Support for books with pictures in them is still spotty, but at least it works for Gutenberg releases.
  4. Re:Nothing incoming by realmolo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.