National Ledger - Million Book Project, Online Library Booms

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By Lynda Johnson Nov 29, 2007

It's an online library boom for the "Million Book Project." On Tuesday, Carnegie Mellon University officials announced their international venture to digitize 1 million books. They blew past that goal and the university has exceeded its goal by 500,000 works of literature, with 7,000 more added daily.

Million Book Project, Online Library Booms

"By the time we sat down and counted it, it was up to 1.5 million" books, said computer science professor Michael Shamos, director of the project and a copyright lawyer. "So we could have had this press conference months ago."

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The repository has 1.5 million books in over 20 languages so far, all of which are available free on its website. This represents just one percent of the world's books, but the team behind the project sees total digitization as the way forward.

"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 University. "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."

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