Do you have a plan for making books that are currently copyrighted available for download? Will it be limited to public domain/CC licensed books?
Is there any way that I would ever be able to borrow one of the Harry Potter books from your library? Are you focusing on cataloging the information about books or are you focusing on making books available to people?
You should really read the Open Library site for the best idea of what its ambitions include. (Just as I'm not speaking for the Internet Archive, where my project is web archiving, I'm not speaking for the Open Library, either.)
Re:Aaron Swartz: Announcing the Open Library
by ivankirigin on Tuesday July 17, 2007 @09:51AM
(#34748)
This is clearly the most important question.
I can understand the confusion given the news.yc context, but some of these comments miss the point. The Open Library is a library, not a startup, and is hosted at the nonprofit Internet Archive[1]. It is thus more of an analogue to Wikipedia -- which it complements in the books domain -- than Scribd.
Entrepreneurial hackers might be interested in the sweep of its mission: catalog every book ever made, using a combination of preexisting data sources and volunteer contributions, and offer free high-quality downloads of full book contents wherever possible. They might be interested in the detailed UI design doc[2], covering the vision for the project's functionality.
They might even be interested in the technology: a new loosely-structured dynamically extensible wiki, with integrated full-text search of both catalog entries and book text -- and all open source[3].
- Gordon
[1] http://www.archive.org
[2] http://demo.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/ui
[3] http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/tech http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/architecture