Books Online...

We all know that the last ten years has seen some major transformations to the face of the WWW. Changes in technology, particulary the advent of relatively-cheap accessible broadband and faster computers with greater storage capabilities, have had major impacts on what we can do online and the ways that we interact with each other using these technologies.

One of the interesting changes is a project called The Internet Archive (TIA) which houses a variety of projects including Project Gutenberg, The Million Book Project and the BBC Documentary archive. Even ten years ago the range of materials provided would still have been a pipe dream: Audio, Moving Images and Text all form key areas for the collections. We used to discuss being able to access a variety of media, and the idea of libraries with their books online was a distant vision in the future: there wasn't public support and the internet was still a world for the weird and geeky. Now libraries are recieving funding to purchase access to electronic material and to support projects such as TIA in scanning their own resources.

The TIA is part of the Open Content Allliance - it is providing free information and as such is providing an alternative to projects such as Google's Book Search. It has support from companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft. Like Google's project, which scans books and provides pages online, it has to deal with copyright and currently removes content that is protected. Fortunately there is still a lot of works that are available out of copyright protection.

The Open Library project has developed scanning technology which allows pages of books to be scanned at 10c/page with 500 pages/hour and thousands of books have been scanned already. With this new technology open source software (DJVu) has been developed which makes reading these scanned books easier.

An example of what they have done can be found here: Alice in Wonderland There is a pdf and links to the DJVu formats.