“The Million Book Project” To Bring 1.5 Million Books To Internet
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The Million Book Project – An International Venture begun in 2002, led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, are now available online through a single site.
Universal Digital Library a.k.a The Million Book Project has wide collection which also includes from Mark Twain’s - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to The Analects of Confucius. These books and the rest of the collection are also available in 20 more languages.
Personally I am a great fan of Mark Twain and during my college days I used to read most of his books starting from - Innocents Abroad to Is Shakespeare Dead? This online library will certainly be a delight for all Mark Twain and other great writer’s fans.
Founder Raj Reddy, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, said in a statement the online archive gives internet users access to a collection the size of a large university library.
So far, the two third books scanned by Universal Digital Library are written in Chinese scripts and the remaining in English. In China and India most of the scanning, digitization and cataloging for the project has been performed.
Although 10% of books available online are for free their long term goal is making the books, artwork and other published works available for free.
Raj Reddy also mentioned that “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language,” he said. “The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling.”
This seems to be great market to exploit. As internet users in India and around the world is increasing at a rapid speed. Microsoft, Google and the Internet Archive are all working on similar book-scanning projects. More of such announcements are expected in near future.
In near future, companies like Sony or Amazon who have launched the kindle (a book reader which can help you to store upto 200 books) can synchronize with such websites to promote their product and also help users to access and store such books. Free Online Library will certainly benefit a large number of audience specially students around the world and in India. As they can easily get access to the books they want to refer. As many of the degree courses seem to be getting expensive, this is leading price increase of the hard copy books at great speed. Not all can afford to buy such costly books, so they will be benefited from such online libraries. Besides students, professionals like teachers, lawyers, doctors and many more will also benefit from it. Personally I really appreciate the step taken by Universal Digital Library.
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check http://dli.iiit.ac.in/ for digitized books of this project.