Yahoo and Open Content Alliance strive to put out-of-copyright books online

Two technology giants are charting different courses to rush the content of the world's libraries onto the Internet and make it freely available to everyone on-line.

The latest effort, announced yesterday and led by Yahoo Inc., aims to have complete electronic copies of thousands of literary classics, videos and speeches ready for download before the year's end.

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The goal is to "share, use and expand all human knowledge," said David Mandelbrot, vice-president of search content at Yahoo.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, together with several archive organizations, technology firms and academic institutions, has created a international consortium called Open Content Alliance that is working to expand the reaches of the Web.

Last year, Yahoo's nemesis, Google Inc., began scanning books as part of a massive effort to create its own searchable and freely accessible global electronic library. Where Google has incurred the wrath of many authors who claim the company is violating copyright rules, Yahoo says the Open Content Alliance will only scan material that is out of copyright or has the approval of its creator.

"It's really important that the content creators have a say in how their material is used on-line," Mr. Mandelbrot said.

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The efforts of both Yahoo and Google could feed each other, said Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto.

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The U of T has been digitizing content for the past decade, using federal funding to scan some 20,000 books that are out of copyright. A year ago, the library began experimenting with an automated scanning process in collaboration with the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. The project has cut copying costs to about 10 cents a page today -- about a 10th what they were a year ago, Ms. Moore said.

The Internet Archive, which has already amassed a huge collection of old Web pages, is storing the library content, which is indexed with Yahoo's search technology and will be made available to other search engines, including Google's.

"The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further -- universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable," Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said on a Yahoo blog posting.

from the Globe and Mail Web titans race to put books on-line.

Also see AP piece Yahoo-backed alliance to open Web library.