Tech Shout!

The Million Book Project has reaches a milestone by completing the digitization of over 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

The international initiative is led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, kicked off in the year 2002. Having a plethora of genres and ranges of books, it is the first time that such a variety of titles are available under a single web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org). It boasts of being the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are copyrighted, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders; therefore the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

Books are digitized, i.e. their text is converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text, to enable them to be searched and, subsequently, reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Interestingly, the humungous compilation also packs in a large number of unique and orphan books. Books in over 20 languages are included in the 1.5 million books, a little over 1 percent of all of the world’s books. Amongst these books, several books, especially in Chinese and English languages, have been digitized.

A major portion of the scanning, digitization and cataloguing has been carried out at centers in China and India, where over 1.1 million and 360,000 books have been scanned, respectively. The U.S., China and India provided $10 million each in cash and in-kind contributions to the project. Sometime back, the Library at Alexandria, Egypt, has joined hands with the rest for the effort. Now, about 7,000 books are scanned daily by over 1,000 workers worldwide.

“Digital libraries constitute an essential part of the future of the developing world,” said Ismail Serageldin, director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina. ”This requires that we approach conditions governing copyright, digital archiving and scientific databases with a view to creating two-tier systems of access to information that would allow access to such data from developing countries for a nominal fee or for free.”

“We greatly value the participation of Bibliotheca Alexandrina,” maintained Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and copyright lawyer. “Scholars everywhere regret the destruction of the Alexandria Library at various points in history, and we’re willing to go to great lengths to see that no such destruction is ever possible in the future. Once books are on the Internet, they become immortal.”

Protecting and preserving texts is a major goal, said Pan Yunhe, the leader of the Million Book Project in China. “Paper gets old and brittle, so books soon become so delicate that no one can read them without damaging them,” said Yunhe, the former president of Zhejiang University who is now vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. “Artwork fades. But once we have digitized texts and illustrations, we can keep them in circulation indefinitely. And by storing them at multiple sites, we can minimize the risk that they be destroyed, as occurred in Alexandria.”

“This collection of books in multiple languages opens up unparalleled opportunities to bring Indian cultural material to everyone, and offers a huge range of possibilities in natural language research,” noted N. Balakrishnan, associate director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, one of the affiliates in the project.

Around half the current collection is under copyright, so only about 10 percent or less of the material in these books is available online and can be accessed absolutely free of charge.

And the success story doesn’t plan to just stop here. At the Third Annual International Conference on Universal Digital Library, held at Carnegie Mellon Nov. 2-4, 2007, the partners in the Million Book Project agreed to continue scanning, to include more centers for the scanning of exceptional and unique materials, and to work on governmental solutions to the problem of books which are out of print but still under copyright.