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Internet Archive Puts 1.6M E-Books On OLPC Laptops

Posted by timothy on from the and-not-just-one-to-a-customer dept.

waderoush writes "Brewster Kahle of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive announced today that all 1.6 million books scanned and digitized by the Archive will be available for reading on XO laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The announcement came during a session on electronic books and electronic publishing at the Boston Book Festival. Kahle said the Archive has been collaborating with OLPC for a year to format the e-books for display on the XO laptops, some 750,000 of which are in use by children in developing countries."

4 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Nice try, but one hard-core fail by unmadindu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Both versions of the XO laptop (1.5 as well as 1) have dual mode screens (the backlight can be turned off to enable reflective mode).

  2. Re:Er... by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Informative

    Although there's not much that can be done about it due to copyright laws, the fact that they're restricted to public-domain books likely skews it even more: there's a lot of 20th-century and 21st-century African literature, for example, but much less from pre-1923.

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Re:Are they in English? by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Informative

    Many are, though a good deal aren't. I don't see a way to browse their texts archive by language (am I missing something?), but you can search by specific language in the advanced search. I can't get them to add up to anything near 1.6 million, so presumably many aren't language-tagged.

    But some rough figures:

    • 354,000 - English
    • 101,000 - French
    • 99,000 - German
    • 22,000 - Italian
    • 17,000 - Spanish
    • 14,000 - Latin
    • 7,000 - Russian
    • 6,000 - Dutch
    • 4,000 - Portuguese
    • 2,000 - Polish
    • 2,000 - Arabic
    • 800 - Urdu
      400 - Swahili
    • 200 - Malay
    • 200 - Turkish
    • 200 - Tamil

    Definitely a skewed distribution, but e.g. 17,000 texts in Spanish is quite a few, certainly more than most children can read!

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  4. Re:You can contribute time to publish free e-books by eulernet · · Score: 4, Informative

    In fact, the proofread is done by the Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net/c/

    BTW, I'd like to know what is done from all the human OCR from the Recaptcha project: http://recaptcha.net/

    Any link to the digitized books ?