Articles
Digital Alexandria
Brewster Kahle wants to create an electronic archive of every word ever published.
09.27.07
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The idea is to build the great library. |
The archive's staff is also hard at work on a more ambitious project of digitizing the nondigital-i.e. books-and creating a freely available repository of the world's literature. "We're scanning books and making them openly available, in contrast to some of the commercial projects going on," says Kahle. One of the "commercial projects," in this case, is Google's better-known for-profit book-scanning operation, a collaboration with libraries including Harvard's and Oxford's. While some are content to take Google's mission to "do no evil" at face value, Kahle subscribes to the power-corrupts-and-absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely philosophy. "They're a media conglomerate," he says. "They started out as search. ‘Oh, we're just search.' It's like, sheeee-yeah," he says, Valley-Girling for emphasis. "They're a media conglomerate and a major one at that."When Google scans a work, the company owns the copyright on the digital edition, Kahle explains. And this troubles him. "We like the idea of having books available online but not the idea of having perpetual restrictions on the public domain, which is what they're doing. They're locking up the public domain." Once Google scans a book, "you'd only be able to get it from Google, under Google's terms, until that division is sold to some other publishing conglomerate." To counter this with his own nonprofit digital library, Kahle has enlisted a rival slate of major libraries, including the Library of Congress, and has begun scanning. The archive has 200,000 books scanned so far, and scans tens of thousands each month.If Kahle succeeds, one day people all over the world will be able to access all the world's information-for free, from home, in their most comfortable pair of socks.