Million Book Project

The Million Book Project, an international effort 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 has recently completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books. "Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library," says Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Raj Reddy. "This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language." While Google, Microsoft, and the Internet Archive have all launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project is the world's largest, university-based, free-access digital library. At least half of the digital books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete text are available for free or soon will be. Many of the books, particularly those in Chinese and English, have had their text converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text, meaning the books can be searched and eventually reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices. "Digital libraries constitute an essential part of the future of the developing world," says Bibliotheca Alexandrina director Ismail Serageldin. "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." About half of the current collection is still under copyright, and only 10 percent or less of those books can be accessed for free until the copyright holders give permission or copyright laws are amended.