Difference engine: Lost in cyberspace | The Economist

Check the link below for more details on Brewster Kahle's latest endeavor

"Open Library, by contrast, is essentially an editable catalogue. The organisation works with various libraries around the world to catalogue their book collections and scan in various texts. So far it has amassed details of over 20m titles and scanned in the contents of some 1.7m books that are in the public domain, and therefore free to download. If a book is still in copyright, it can be checked out as a digital loan for a couple of weeks—rather like a book from a bricks-and-mortar library."

Difference engine: Lost in cyberspace | The Economist