http://icommons.org/articles/open-library-all-the-books-you-could-ever-read

Open Library - All The Books You Could Ever Read Rebecca Kahn

Open Library by JaunJaen on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 Back in the mists of time, when we used to look things up in books, and not on Google, libraries were the first place we used to go. For many people, the person you turned to when you wanted to know something, was a librarian. They would direct you to the book, dictionary or other resource where you could find what you were looking for. Libraries were also the place where we could wander, picking up books that appealed to us just because they looked interesting, browsing and moving on. Much like many people now use the Internet – wandering from source to source, reading a bit here and there and then moving on. One would imagine that, in the digital age, libraries and online communities would meld really well, since, for many people, the process of (and pleasure they take in) finding information is the same. It hasn’t always been the case, though. Many libraries have resisted using and cataloguing on the internet, and many developers baulk at the volume of content, and prefer to look at ways of presenting new information, rather than reformatting information that already exists. But the instances where libraries and developers have come together, the results have been spectacularly exciting. Google Book Search, LibraryThing, and Librivox are some of the examples. And now there is another one: an elegant, useful, totally comprehensive and exciting project called Open Library, a brainchild of the Internet Archive. Due to launch in October, Open Library is the big daddy of online libraries – it’s a place where entire books are housed, as beautiful, elegant scans. You can see the illustrations and covers of books long out of print. You can also find the metadata about the book – in a pop-up that looks just like an old fashioned catalogue card, you can find a book’s ISBN number, publisher, date of publication, what collection the physical book belongs to, and where it was housed. It’s a phenomenal wealth of information, tailor-made for the bookworms and data-freaks. But Open Library has taken this degree of access one step further. If a book is in the public domain, it is free to download, print and share from the site. Or you can send it to a third-party printer, who will print it for a nominal fee. If an audio version of the book exists, you can listen to it. And if you have a collection of your own public domain books, you can load them up onto the site. Books can be read in different viewers, and some of them will be offered on the $100 laptops for children around the world. Open Library aims to, one day, include all books that have ever been published. That’s a huge task. At the moment, they’re partnering with over 30 different libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the University of Toronto to scan and load all or part of their collections. It’s a beautiful, exciting, inspiring project. iCommons spoke to Aaron Swartz, the Tech lead on the Open Library project, a man who reads a lot of books…