Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Would you like to read a book?

In the news:

"Nearly a decade ago, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project with an astonishingly lofty goal: Digitize the published works of humankind and make them freely available online.

The architects of the project said Tuesday they have surpassed their latest target, having scanned more than 1.5 million books - many of them in Chinese - and are continuing to scan thousands more daily.

'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, a computer science and robotics professor at the university who spearheaded the project."

Here is the main entry point to the Universal Digitial Library.

The current status report shows a surprising mix. They have 9 books on commerce, 67 autobiographical books, but 152,885 on education.

I found the User Interface weak. I had trouble finding books by author. Some times when I tried to read a book I was told I was not authorized to read that book.

I think this is a fun project, hopefully they'll clean up some of the problems.


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