[16113] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Comment on Yahoo eBook Project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hart)
Tue Oct 4 20:29:39 2005
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0510031056390.9014@pglaf.org>
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 10:57:13 -0700
Reply-To: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@pobox.com>
From: Michael Hart <hart@PGLAF.ORG>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Yet another consortium of multi-billion dollar institutions
has thrown its hat into the eBook/eLibrary ring today, just
9 months before the 35th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg's
placement on the Internet of the first eLibrary element, on
July 4th, 1971.
Last December 14th Google used a multi-million dollar blitz
of television, radio and print media to announce the Google
Print revolution: "Today is the day the world changes," but
so far it has been difficult to get even a handful of books
from their project, some 10 months later.
I am wondering of the news media will give the same kind of
coverage to a second such announcement, which will also put
up an alliance of an Internet search engine giant with some
multi-billion dollar libraries. I will be watching all the
news programs tonight in eager anticipation, as I was doing
last December, but I fear that "once burned/twice cautious"
might take some of the wind out of their sails/sales.
However, this effort has one huge advantage: "The Internet
Archive," run by my friend Brewster Kahle. Brewster is one
person who has a proven ability to put an enormous resource
on the Internet for the whole wide world to use.
This different is such that I am willing to bet that Yahoo!
gets off to a better start in the next 10 months than did a
rather completely false start by Google.
Of course, the real test will be to see how long it takes a
project such as this to reach a million eBooks, since there
are already well over 100,000 eBooks already available free
for the taking on various Internet sites, perhaps 50,000 of
them from the various Project Gutenberg sites.
Here's a hope that a few years from now anyone can have the
advantage of a million book home library, and in even a few
years more to ten million books sitting on one inch of your
own bookshelf next to your computer.
Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg
