Lisa Rein shows a brief video of the Bookmobile: a van with access to tons of books and a bunch of printers. Brewster Kahle says that the Library of Congress says that it costs $2.00 to check a book out and back in; he can print a copy of a book for less than that and charges $1/book.

Brewster says that traditionally we’ve been good about aggregating books in libraries. To preserve them, he’s digitizing and replicating. E.g., his group donated a scanner to Egypt and they’re scanning 2,000 pages a day.

There are about 16M books in the public domain in the Us libraries. There are about 8M from before 1923 and 8M from 1923-1963 that are in the public domain. About 20,000 have been digitized and accessible. With Creative Commons and Research Library Group, Brewster’s group is going to catalog the US reserach libraries to find out what we have and what’s out of copyright.

He talks six of his heroes, people who are putting themselves on line for the public domain:

– Rick Prelinger: digitizing film for free use
– Michael Hart: Project Gutenberg. 7,000 books keyed in so far.
– Gretchen Phillips: Digitizing children’s books
– Charles Franks: Distributed Proof Reading project
– The Million Books Project in India
– Tim O’Reilly: copyright of 14 yrs

Three things work against the public domain: Copyright, Access and License.

Copyright we know about: we’ve gone from a copyright of 28 years to life + 70.

Access: The public domain is locked up in private collections and libraries. It’s just hard to get ahold of the material. He warns that some companies that should know better are going to be announcing that they’re going to assert new rights over public domain materials, making it hard to spider them and access them. [Adobe?]

Corbis (owned by B. Gates) digitized a lot of photos from the National Archive and now claims that have the right to protect it via license. You can go an redigitize it, but getting access is difficult.

We need to bring public access to the public domain. It’ll take some work, some technology and some page-turning. It’d cost about $26M (a dollar a book) and the Library of Congress’ budget is about half a billion. At least let’s do the easy stuff: the public domain.

Terrific presentation. It’s great to hear someone who is doing good. And the book samples he passed around, fresh from the BookMobile press, are elegant and readable and cool.

Categories: Uncategorized dw