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Carnegie Mellon's Digital Library Exceeds 1.5 Million Books
cashman73 writes "Most Slashdot readers are probably familiar with Google's book scanning project, a collaboration with several major universities to digitize works of literature, art, and science. But Google may have been beat to the punch this time -- about a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project to scan books into digital format, to be made available online. Today, according to new reports, they now have a collection of 1.5 million books, the equivalent of a typical university library, available online."
http://tera-3.ul.cs.cmu.edu/
Towards the Singularity.
This site (which is found at ulib.org BTW) seems to have a pretty good collection of obvious titles to choose from, though having to download a custom plug-in to read anything is a bit annoying (and apparently temporary). I played around for a while, seeing what I could dig up, and didn't see any obvious gaps (though I purposely avoided anything modern).
As an author, I was always a bit worried having Google as the sole gatekeeper for this kind of service... not that I necessarily distrust Google's intentions, but if they changed their worldview one day, it'd be a pity to have so much work invested in only one place, and have to re-build it all somewhere else. It's nice that there are proper choices, and not all from a commercial stance either.
I don't know how smooth the integration process is (I submitted one of my books, but it appears it's a very un-automated system involving email etc, so it will probably take a while to see results). But still, I'm glad they're giving authors a way to help grow the library. Here's hoping it becomes even better than its promise!
The world's only surviving livewriter.
i really like the idea of online libraries, but i had to laugh when i got the following result for the first book that came to mind: "Please provide a valid query (Word greater than length 3)" the book was "the old man and the sea".
I picked a book at random, Dickens' tale of 2 cities. Here's the first few lines:
"TIT was the best of tunes, it was the worst of times,..."
"li was tie winter of despair, we had everything before us,..."
I guess they just OCR'd books en-masse without proof reading. Oh well, think of it as an exercise for your brain.