2003-04-23 Under the Hood of the Internet Archive's Digital Bookmobile http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/3720 bookmobile: van with a satellite internet connection to grab books from online and print them out. it takes 20 minutes for 300 page wizard of oz -- printer limited (one person can run 4 printers; 1 person is 30 books an hour). that's black and white. very cost effective. harvard: $2 to lend a book, get it back, and put it on the shelf. cheaper to print it and give it away only possible because there's a commons to draw on Next... 30 bookmobiles in India, going to be announced in 1 week [I wonder how much the bookmobile costs to run, including people, van maintenance, etc.] Why? Universal access to all human knowledge brewster's running over a whole bunch of famous libraries, and then saying when they got burned. good lesson... digitise and replicate. books: 16 million books in US public domain, in libraries 20 thousand are digitised and accessibble 8 million pre 1963, 8 million 1923-1963 they're launching a project to tag books with copyright information and where they are. difficulty: digitising a book could reset the copyright -- it's unsure whether this is the case. this will be an issue to be settled in the near future. India and China are scanning loads of books, joint project: India doing 1m, China 0.5m. copyright extending, you don't need to register it any longer.. [usual rant here about copyright] on whether bill gates should be allowed to extend the copyright by 100 years just by scanning something and stamping a logo over it: "that doesn't seem to pass the smell test of what's right with the world." important: "reincentivise people without invoking copyright" -- that's tricky ==== Rumblings. James Cronin points me at this http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/collections/ and then of course http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/collections/archive.htm which I'd completely forgotten about.