The Million Book Project

[iMav]

The Million Book Project (or the Universal Library), led by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University Libraries, aims to digitize a million books by 2007. Working with government and research partners in India and China, the project is scanning 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 today, they have completed the scanning of 1 Million Books and have made accessible the entire database from http://www.ulib.org

Twenty-two scanning centers are operating in India, including four mega-centers. Eighteen centers are running in China, including a mega-center in a free-trade zone to avoid customs delays with shipments of books from the United States. Materials are also being scanned in Egypt, Hawaii, and Carnegie Mellon.

As of November 2005, over 600,000 books have been scanned: 170,000 in India, 420,000 in China, and 20,000 in Egypt. Roughly 135,000 of the books are in English; the others are in Indian, Chinese, Arabic, French, or other languages. Most of the books are in the public domain, but permission has been acquired to include over 60,000 copyrighted books (roughly 53,000 in English and 7,000 in Indian languages). The books will be mirrored at sites in India, China, Carnegie Mellon, the Internet Archive, and possibly other locations. The books that have been scanned to date are not yet all available online, and no single site has copies of all the books that are available online.

The Million Book Project

Source

[Gigacore]

I thought its Gutenburg again...

anyway.. thanks for the info