Today Aaron Swartz announced that he’s been stealthily working on Brewster Kahle’s Open Library. It is intended to be a wiki card catalog of every book ever printed. Full text is available for books that are old enough to be in the public domain. The books are scanned, so the pictures are intact (along with the notes in the margins of some of the old books). The full text of some academic papers is also available. There are also links to stores that sell the book and libraries in your vicinity that have it.
British Museum Reading Room
This is not another Project Gutenberg. PG has full text for about 21,000 public domain books. The Open Library already has metadata for about 500,000 books. They link to PG among other sources.
This is a good overview of what they have in mind and how they’re doing it: The Open Library Vision
This is the demo site: Open Library
:: Raw Thought
