Internet Archive founder turns to new information storage device – the book

[Turborama]

Source: The Guardian

Brewster Kahle, the man behind a project to file every webpage, now wants to gather one copy of every published book

Monday August 1 2011 11.43 BST

Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.

Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the non-profit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every webpage ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

"There is always going to be a role for books," said Kahle, as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. "We want to see books live forever."

So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about a million titles, with each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archive-books-brewster-kahle

[SpiralHawk]

1. In related news, Noah (R) announces plans for a clone ark

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Let's hope he does it more ethically than Google is trying do it.

Interestingly, Google has a goal of making a virtual copy of everybook, but has gotten in repeated trouble for not getting copyright permissions.

On a lighter note, just the zilliions of titles of Harlequin Romances would bankrupt any effort, I should think.

[Historic NY]

4. then you get some book teasers from them....

I've been kicking the tires over here... http://openlibrary.org/

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Hey! cool site.

I like the way they arrange topics and related books.
Fer instance, I clicked on Tacitus, and it gave me headings for, among other things, "Rome" and clicking on that gave me titles about Rome, titles set in Rome, etc.
Cool.

thanks.....:hi:

[Historic NY]

7. I get lost in the history stuff... one thing leads to another.....

you can add books too.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

6. they only need one of those Harlequins..

just insert a note at the end to start over at the beginning, changing names and places. The plots are all the same, anyway.

[Odin2005]

8. The thrift store I work at is overflowing with shitty romance novels.

How can people read such DRIVEL?

[saras]

9. The same way people can like pictures, even bad ones, that blind people just don't get

How can people watch such drivel as action movies? Nothing but adrenalin and violence. Drama. Car chases, explosions, guns, machines, monsters - why? Who cares? No one wants drama in their life, and we rightly call others on it. Why the hell would we want it in movies and books, then?

[struggle4progress]

3. A million isn't even close. Harvard's 16 million isn't close. Library of Congress has 22 million and

isn't close

Google Books calculates the total number of books ever written at almost 130 million
Aug. 6, 2010 (9:35 am) By: John Brownlee
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/google-books-calculates-the-total-number-of-books-ever-written-at-almost-130-million-2010086/

[boppers]

11. It depends on what's being counted.

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

They're working on about a billion "unique" "books", and then trying to weed out things like special cover art editions, different printing editions, and the like.

"After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday." (As of August 5th, 2010)

[pipoman]

10. He don't have enough money, space, or time...

"wants to gather one copy of every published book"