Online library offers 1.5 million works and counting

The Universal Digital Library, a project backed by major libraries around the world, offers more than 1.5 million digital books free to the public. It offers full text downloads in HTML, TIFF, and DjVu formats.

There are plenty of websites that offer free books in the public domain and perhaps most well-known among them is Project Gutenberg and Google Books. The Universal Digital Library (UDL) project is now doing the same thing, but without the controversy of copyright problems, as all the books in its list are available in the public domain with the authors’ consent. The copyrighted books are also digitized, but only abstracts are provided for those titles. They will be released to the public once their copyrights expire. The UDL is partially funded by National Science Foundation, and it includes books from major institutions like Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, Carnegie Mellon University, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science, seven Chinese universities, and eight Indian universities. Personally, I find it surprising Google is not on this list, as they could have helped quite a bit. The website is currently slow because this news has driven traffic to the site, which is why I believe Google could have helped them with servers to handle traffic. But UDL decided to go alone. Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and director of intellectual property for the Universal Digital Library (UDL), said:

"You're not going to find over 900,000 works in Chinese on Google."

According to Shamos, they are not interested in gaining more customers, but instead developing a site where anyone can get free books from anywhere. UDL offers books in three formats: PDF, TIFF and DjVu (pronounced déjà vu, as it is an alternative format to PDF). Google projects contain both free and paid versions of books in PDF format only. UDL makes it easy for users to download books and organization offers a comprehensive list of rare books that are not usually available, along with classic books. Shamos uses an example “ancient archery” which you may not usually find, whereas UDL carries a range of books on that topic. Microsoft is working on a similar project, but with limited selection of books. UDL is also undertaking this project for preservation reasons; we have all seen examples of fires or over-use that can damage books (like the original Alexandria library that was burned down by a fire and precious books were lost). UDL will store books in multiple places, so once digitized, they will be forever preserved. The protective method is used so it will be impossible for any person or government to destroy precious works. The UDL project was started five years ago by a team led by Raj Reddy, a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science and Robotics professor. Reddy has been awarded the ACM Turing Award and French Legion of Honor. I think this is a great start; with various universities working together, you will not only see English books but also other languages and books from different countries. It will make one giant world library.