Intrinsitivity

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, unveils the Open Library, an online repository housing thousands of public domain books. I like several things about the Open Library:

1. A Clean Interface. The interface is super clean, which minimizes distractions when reading or scanning through books.
2. Reading Options. So you don’t like reading online. Send the book to Lulu.com, who will print the book you want and snailmail it to you for a very reasonable price. Or, suppose you don’t mind reading online but like to read ebooks on your PDA. In that case, just download a PDF version of your book and sync it over.
3. Audio Recordings. Soon you will be able to listen to an audio recording of any book at the Open Library, so you can choose to read along or just listen and let someone read to you.
4. Magnification. Text from scanned images can be painful to read. To make your online reading life easier, soon you will also be able to zoom into a page and magnify its text.

My only complaint is the missing home link. Otherwise, I am happy to see that Kahle and his friends at the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance are working to digitize books. Ideally, all books everywhere would be free for everyone, but until that time comes, and I doubt it will, this makes for a great start. And I can’t wait to see how Google responds given their recent efforts along the same lines.