Free To The People
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, talks about digitizing everything:
He talks about digitizing books and making them available online for everyone. Of course, the books have to be out of copyright. The hardware to support the entire Library of Congress (over 26 million books) would only cost $60000.
Book scanning facilities have been set up around the world. A few of the big ones in North America are at UCLA and the University of Toronto.
He talks about mobile book printers, basically a van with an internet connection and a printer and a book binder, making it possible to print a book for 1 cent / page.
This is an especially interesting cycle: scanning a one of a kind book, uploading it, downloading it, printing it, binding it, having a physical copy in a matter of minutes, basically anywhere in the world.
He talks about being able to archive television. Also about eBook readers.
Music and Movies are difficult to archive and make available for free because there’s so much litigation and bullshit surrounding them, but the Internet Archive is “offering shelf space on the net” for anyone who wants to upload things like live concerts and amateur videos.
That reminds me of home-video footage of the Challenger explosion in 1986 that was basically sitting in some guy’s basement for 20 years. It’s thought to be the only home-video of the explosion in existence.
Now it’s on youtube, so maybe you’ll see advertisements……….
but at least it’s still free.
