Open Library
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.
Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.
But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open.
So let us do just that: let us build the Open Library.
(Source)
The structure of the full text entries – scanned pages, simulated page turning, search bar (a simplified version of Amazon’s ‘Look Inside This Book!’ feature) – is a little too pretty for my taste, but usable. Like Google Book Search, this feature of Open Library may prove useful for those who work with books with expired copyrights, and who have qualms about the loss of ‘bibliographic codes’ in other strategies for providing full text (e.g., the text transcriptions of Project Gutenberg).
