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October 4, 2005

Racing to Build the World's Biggest Library

You may have heard Yahoo's having a go at digitizing and cataloguing millions of books as part of the Open Content Alliance. So far, Google's attempts to do the same have been going less than gangbusters, so you have to wonder what the appeal is (other than "organizing the world's information, blah, blah, blah...)

University of California's Daniel Greenstein says it's about gap-filling. After all, even the biggest libraries on the world are incomplete, and Google and Yahoo both have the potential to build a digital library that would dwarf even the US Library of Congress.

Sounds great, really. I spend a ton on books each month because digital versions aren't easily available. For instance, I'm reading the awesome Freakonomics right now, and was just wondering why I don't have a searchable electronic version. I'd gladly pay for one.

And building accessibility features into whatever software was used to read those books would make all those books easily available to people who are visually or otherwise impaired. No more waiting on the audiobook or Braille version.

Of course, there's the copyright issue, which desperately needs to be solved, because being restricted to print copies is beginning to get absurd.

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