Last week a conference was held in San Francisco of the players in the Open Consort Alliance, a group of organizations who have agreed to join Brewster Kahle's Digital Library Project hosted on Archive.com the Internet Archive site. I was fortunately able to talk with one of the attendees. In summary:

The million books project was a pilot project in India with 10000 books supplied by Brewster. A robotic scanner was used. The results were less than marvelous. The new scanner in San Francisco is manually (pedal) operated. The books are placed on a 90 degree opening support and two cameras alternately photograph the left and right pages at 3 seconds per page. Glass plates flatten each page.Scanning is in full color at 300 or 500 dpi. The stored images are in Jpeg2000 format, a lossless compression format roughly equivalent to a compressed tiff file in size. From this file derivative formats are generated. The initial project is all the books in the California State Libraries that are public domain. Sample tif files were 5 meg for a viewable image so this is not for the faint of heart with a 32K modem. Images were all oriented properly and no skewing. Colored pictures were quite respectable at 300 dpi 24 bit color. Currently only about 300 books are online at the open books project, but that will obviously grow. Participating libraries benefit from the free scanning and the provision of scanned files on 200 G hard drives (user supplied). The books are stored on Brewster's "Petabox" which I understand means 10^5 Gigs.

Lulu was present at the forum. They are going to be the "print" arm of the project for those who want printed copies of the books. I was pleased to find out that the president of Lulu had brought along in his bag of tricks a copy of my Lulu book "The Blockade Runners" as an example of the kind of output which could be expected.

This project offers an ideal opportunity to put some of the early Jules Verne Hetzels on-line with really good quality. In order to do this we would need (1) someone with a pipeline to Brewster Kahle and (2) collectors willing to part with their books for a time and (3) probably an organization to front for the project.

Brewster favors books without user limitations. Since the whole book is scanned including inside covers this is the opportunity to tip in a removable bookplate "This book was contributed to the Open Library by the generosity of xxx yyyyy December, 2005. "