An open-source rival to Google's book project (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

ZDNet looks at the current state of online book archiving and the recently launched Open Library effort. "When it comes to digitizing books, two stories appear to be unfolding: One is about open source, and the other, Google. Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitize all the world's books and make them universally available."

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An open-source rival to Google's book project (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 27, 2005 17:23 UTC (Thu) by jhoger (guest, #33302) [Link]

These projects are for the most part orthogonal.

Google's project is about making ALL the world's content searchable.

The other is about making as much of the world's content as its creators will allow easily available.

Why the latter's supporters isn't just getting behind established projects like Gutenberg and Creative Commons, I do not know.

Any way you look at it, it's all very good news so far.

-- John.

An open-source rival to Google's book project (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 27, 2005 19:42 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

Microsoft getting behind something they don't own?

An open-source rival to Google's book project (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 30, 2005 18:40 UTC (Sun) by withaar (guest, #4201) [Link]

Embrace and extend. Google is a powerful player and therefore a competitor, if not now than in the future. At one time MS did not make a wordprocessor either. If software indeed becomes a commodity than what remains is control of access to information.