A Wealth of Words at Open Library
March 28, 2014
Looking for a book, any book? Head on over to Open Library, whose laudable goal is to provide “one web page for every book.” Though they have not reached that possibly unachievable aim, the many contributors have made a dent; the page hosts over 20 million documents. Open Library’s home page explains that, much like Wikipedia, the whole project is “open”—open software, open data, open documentation, and an invitation for anyone to “fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget.” The site’s About page explains:
“At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you’re looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell’s where you can purchase your own copy.”
How is this different from Project Gutenberg? Well, while Open Library strives to provide at the very least a link to every book in existence, Gutenberg seems content to host a mere 30,000 or so volumes. Part of what makes Open Library’s approach possible is the “borrow modern ebooks” option—users check out and relinquish access to digital copies of works still in copyright. The site pursues the rights to lend these books several ways. Some are contributed by the more-than-1,000 libraries participating in the In-Library Lending Program. There is also a smaller collection of about 11,000 ebooks contributed by the Internet Archive. Open Library also links to WorldCat and OverDrive.com to help users find any works not available in their expanding collection. Bookmark this one for the next time you need to find a book. Any book.
Cynthia Murrell, March 28, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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2 Responses to “A Wealth of Words at Open Library”
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I suspect or hope some of the links will also link to Hathi-Trust which holds those books which were digitized by the Google Books project through universities.
Hathi-Trust and various universities are now trying to expand the access to many of these full-text books through contacts with authors and publishers.
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