The Open Library doesn't share books, but only seeks to create a "web page for every book ever published". It is volunteer-crafted, and depends on volunteers to reach its goal. You can create a webpage for any book too.... Aaron Swartz sadly suicided at a very early age, because his ideas of sharing knowledge were in conflict with those being pushed by law and commercial interests today.
Open Library is *an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published"*. Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. https://openlibrary.org/ The Internet Archive shares full-texts of books, mostly copyright-expired ones, or those shared by their authors/publishers/copyright holders. It has also made the argument that loaning books online should be like those loaned by a library -- one given out at a time, for each copy bought. See https://archive.org/ Names like Brewster Kahle figure in both... hat tip to the Indian/*desi* names on the list, who appreciated the importance of sharing. The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. https://archive.org/ Not to be missed out is what seems like the grandiloquently-named The Million Books Project The *Million Book Project* (or the *Universal Library*) was a book digitization project led by Raj Reddy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_Reddy> at Carnegie Mellon University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_University> School of Computer Science and University Libraries from 2001 to 2008. Working with government and research partners in India <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India> (Digital Library of India <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Library_of_India>) and China <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China>, the project scanned books in many languages, using OCR <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition> to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web. As of 2007, they have completed the scanning of 1 million books and have made the entire catalog accessible online. https://archive.org/details/millionbooks https://www.rr.cs.cmu.edu/mbdl.htm Everyone once saw this as a conspiracy to grab the knowledge of the world. Dr Reddy is getting there, if he hasn't already reached. Today, thanks to him, many Goa-related copyright-expired books are available online too. (Many, many other books too, far beyond Goa, in so many languages.) -- FN * +91-9822122436 * 784 Saligao 403511 Bardez Goa
