[FACT comments: Information just wants to be FREE! Internet Archive is a FACT partner.]
The Internet Archive Keeps Book-Scanning Free
By Dave Bullock
Wired: March 19, 2008
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/multimedia/2008/03/gallery_internet_archive
Google has made headlines over the last two years for scanning thousands of copyrighted works for its Book Search project, but Internet Archive is quietly digitizing around 1,000 public domain titles every day…With monastic diligence, workers sit in book-scanning stations and manually turn pages all day long. The process is labor-intensive, but surprisingly efficient: The text collection on archive.org is the world’s largest online collection of free books, with nearly 350,000 titles and growing…It’s still unclear whether the courts will allow copyrighted books scanned by Google to stay online, but the titles scanned at the Internet Archive will always be free and available. You can even order copies to be printed on demand and shipped to your home, paying only for production costs.
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