Friday, November 01, 2019

Weaving Books Into the Web

The Internet Archive is working with Wikipedia to integrate content from it's huge collection of scanned books into Wikipedia articles.
For example, the Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King, Jr cites the book To Redeem the Soul of America, by Adam Fairclough. That citation now links directly to page 299 inside the digital version of the book provided by the Internet Archive. There are 66 cited and linked books on that article alone. 
 Readers can see a couple of pages to preview the book and, if they want to read further, they can borrow the digital copy using Controlled Digital Lending in a way that’s analogous to how they borrow physical books from their local library.
This is a great idea and I hope it takes off. It's similar to what Google had in mind when it started scanning books a decade ago, but that project got shot down because of objections from publishers. Hopefully, that won't happen this time.

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