You know, this World Wide Web thing might just work out after all. The always interesting Conversational Reading links us to this interview with Aaron Swartz, whose latest initiative is a Web 2.0 project called Open Library:
Open Library is a new online tool for finding information about books – even (perhaps especially) for titles that are out-of-print, scarce, or likely to find one reader per decade, if even that. It is, so to speak, a catalog with benefits. If a text is available in digital format, there is a link. you to it. Citations and excerpts from reviews will be available. Likewise, cross-references to other works on related topics. A user of Open Library can see the cover of the book and, in some cases, search the contents.
I know what you’re saying — we already have Amazon, WorldCat, and Google Books. Open Library would bring all these tools together, plus anything else digitally available for a book, plus the power of a wiki so that users can update, annotate, and correct information, plus data-mining capabilities for in-depth research.
If you have a moment, go to the site and click on the cover of a book. It is really quite lovely– you can sit and read a digital copy of a physical book from an actual library, pencil marks, coffee stains, and all. The pages even turn as you click. Try it!
Filed under: books, libraries, reading, reference, technology
Interesting, thanks, I’ll have to check this out!
Cvillewords wrote: I know what you’re saying — we already have…
Don’t forget about “Project Gutenberg”. As for Amazon.com I don’t really count them because they cost $.
Hello, Woeful. Your blog is hilarious.
Yo, Kempis. I look stuff up on Amazon all the time, for instance, to find an ISBN or publisher. Doesn’t mean I order it, though. But don’t tell Amazon….
Excellent your web. Good work. If you want to enter in my page: http://de.muestrarios.org/
Who decides which books get press (Harry Potter) and which get censored? After all, censorship is becoming America’s favorite past-time. The US gov’t (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like “America Deceived” from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (especially for books).
Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (Book)
Wasn’t GoogleBooks planning to be the one to pull ‘em all together?
This subsumes even Google Books!