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Coming: the Open Library for all

Quinn Norton© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

It will soon allow people to print out genuine-looking pages from a vast online archive

San Francisco: Imagine a library where you can find all the books in the first place you look. Imagine you can search, Google-style, over their text, and then feel the pages between your fingers, or see the tea splotches of the first readers, perhaps long dead. And imagine doing all of this in your own home. The plan is a book lover's dream; and the particular book lover intent on creating this Open Library is Brewster Kahle, known as the digital librarian of the Internet.

Mr. Kahle made his name indexing and storing the Web in his Internet Archive. His non-profit organisation, stationed in an unassuming colonial home here, has moved on to grab and upload all kinds of media: public domain films, audio archives, and amateur endeavours such as Project Gutenberg, which has been painstakingly hand-typing public domain texts since the 1970s. Now he has taken the idea of digitising the text of books one step further, and is storing not just the text, but, incredibly, high-resolution snapshots of book pages, good enough to reproduce on your screen every fold, blotch and texture of the world's catalogue of public domain works.

It is an ambitious project, but he has allies among other technologists, and the support of companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. A consortium of technology companies, libraries and academic institutions has formed the Open Content Alliance, working together to create the Open Library, the future home of these works. Book-scanning itself is a sophisticated technical challenge. The latest-generation scanner used by the project produces books of 16 megapixel pages for a little under 10 cents (about Rs. 4.50) a page.

A cradle holds the book open in a 90 degree V-shape, while cameras perched overhead, and controlled by the scanner's central software, shoot the high-resolution images. Software creates a text version, and the images themselves are collated and used to create beautiful digital books, which you can print from anywhere with the images of the text intact. All that is missing is the smell of old books.

The data is conveyed to the archive's `Petaboxes' — a bright red computer, tall and deeper than a bookshelf, is filled with pizza-box-shaped computers . Each box stores 80 terabytes, or the equivalent of about three Libraries of Congress.

At the equivalent of Rs. 4.50 a page, the money and support needs to be committed, but Mr. Kahle's supporters have deep pockets, and an enthusiasm for the project.

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