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Tuesday, December 14, 2004

The Local Public Webrary
You're a library. You have all these books crowding up shelves that could be better used by auto parts. A dilemma in the making. What do you do? Well, if you're the libraries of Michigan and Stanford universities, the archives at Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library, you let the folk at Google scan a whole lot of stuff, put all of the public domain stuff up on the web while providing abstracts for the copyrighted material. About 1 million books in total will be scanned.

It'll take six years to complete the process. Hopefully no new books will come out in the interim that might extend the process. Links on the pages will be to public libraries where the books can be borrowed and to... Amazon...?
# Permalink Posted at 4:24 AM 4 comments Email this Link

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Amazon.
As if.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=books
Heh.

# posted by Terry 6:01 AM

The Chronicle of Higher Education (www.chronicle.com) has this article:
UNORIGINAL SIN
Lazy students are not the only ones guilty of plagiarizing. We found four scholars who copied the work of others without giving credit. How many more plagiarists are out there?

Too bad it is subscription required.
It basically says that many PROFESSORS are plagiarists.

Well, once all the library content is online, how many more will be exposed?

,dave

# posted by Dave Barnes 7:57 PM

...or created?

# posted by Bill 2:06 AM

Don't worry, Bill...nothing new will ever be available for fre eagain...nothing else will ever lapse from copyright ever again...Mickey's greasing the palms of our congress critters to see to that.

The real question I have is: Can I get a few DVD-Rs of eBooks that are public domain? I wnat something kinda like what I got one from Project Gutenberg.

Finally, I've got a 12-DVD set of eBooks in Text, HTML, and PDF format. They cover everything from survival & weapons to rebuilding civilization and eduction. I'd like to make the information portable. (See Larry Niven's "Lucifer's Hammer" for what I'm thinking about.) What Palm-sized device can store them all? I see Palms with SD cards (1 gig SD cards are available) but 50 SD cards seems a bit tough to manage. I see CF cards that are much larger (6+ gigs) but very few Palms take CF cards...The HandEra 330 was the last that I'm aware of. Any ideas?

Andy Out!

# posted by Andy@RecycledElectrons.com 10:18 AM

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