Condensed version of 10/24/09 article on Xcomony.com by Wade Roush, chief correspondent
All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle announced today at the Boston Book Festival in downtown Boston.
Kahle said the announcement capped a year-long collaboration between the Internet Archive and the OLPC, which was founded by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte. “
The little green laptop, called the XO, “makes a really good reader,” said Kahle, an MIT-educated computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Internet Archive in 1996.
The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”
Now the books will also be available to the roughly 750,000 to 1 million schoolchildren in developing countries who have XO laptops.
“We set a date of this meeting, a year ago, to say let’s get our books in really good shape,” Kahle told Xconomy after the panel session. “We were first going to do it in PDF, because the screen is a really a beautiful screen, but we found that if we were really going to make it work for people in developing countries—if you want to get this to kids in Uruguay—then having a 10-kilobyte file beats the heck out of a 5-megabyte file. So we went and converted our books such that it would work. And the One Laptop Per Child guys went and made it so that those worked well on the XO. They are working very hard to make it so that kids can search on and find those books, and one million six hundred thousand now will be available to the one millions users of the One Laptop Per Child. We’re really psyched about that.”
He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don’t provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition—so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Straube Foundation encourages you to...
... get your virtual library card: http://www.archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php
... volunteer to help scan books: http://www.archive.org/about/archivejobs.php#vol
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hello In my opinion you are wrong. Let's discuss it.
Post a Comment