Knowledge... is waiting to break free

[Frederick Noronha]

The Open Library doesn't share books, but only seeks to create a "web page for every book ever published". It is volunteer-crafted, and depends on volunteers to reach its goal. You can create a webpage for any book too.... Aaron Swartz sadly suicided at a very early age, because his ideas of sharing knowledge were in conflict with those being pushed by law and commercial interests today.

Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. 

https://openlibrary.org/

The Internet Archive shares full-texts of books, mostly copyright-expired ones, or those shared by their authors/publishers/copyright holders. It has also made the argument that loaning books online should be like those loaned by a library -- one given out at a time, for each copy bought. See https://archive.org/ Names like Brewster Kahle figure in both... hat tip to the Indian/desi names on the list, who appreciated the importance of sharing.

The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials.

https://archive.org/

Not to be missed out is what seems like the grandiloquently-named The Million Books Project

The Million Book Project (or the Universal Library) was a book digitization project led by Raj Reddy at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University Libraries from 2001 to 2008. Working with government and research partners in India (Digital Library of India) and China, the project scanned books in many languages, using OCR to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web. As of 2007, they have completed the scanning of 1 million books and have made the entire catalog accessible online.

https://archive.org/details/millionbooks

https://www.rr.cs.cmu.edu/mbdl.htm

Everyone once saw this as a conspiracy to grab the knowledge of the world. Dr Reddy is getting there, if he hasn't already reached. Today, thanks to him, many Goa-related copyright-expired books are available online too. (Many, many other books too, far beyond Goa, in so many languages.)

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FN * +91-9822122436 * 784 Saligao 403511 Bardez Goa