Library of public domain books preview — MSFT will add 150k titles in 06

Cory Doctorow 2:30 am Wed Oct 26, 2005

The Open Content Alliance is scanning in hundreds of thousands of public-domain books. According to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, "At an Internet Archive event in San Francisco tonight 14 libraries and MSN joined the Open Content Alliance. MSN kicked off their association by committing to scan 150k books in 2006! (this is a big deal, in my opinion). "

As if that's not cool enough, there's a preview of one of the ways that you'll be able to read the Alliance's output that's just gone live. It has a gorgeous in-browser book-viewer that combines the best elements of a physical book (tactility, the idiosyncracies of printed type) with an electronic book (zoomability, searchability, ~~text-to-speech~~ audio). It's gorgeous.

(Thanks, Brewster and Beatrice!)

Update: Gord sez, "readings are done by volunteers. For example 'International Episode' was read by the Librivox Project which you mentioned in BoingBoing previously. By the way, Librivox now has 7 books completed and available for download with 18 additional books in process. Here's the current Librivox catalog."

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