According to the Associated Press, Microsoft has reached an agreement with "the British Library" (is there only one?) to scan and put online 100,000 books, which will be available free online "next year". The article suggests
At 08:33 PM 11/7/05 +0000, you wrote: that the
project will be limited to books in the public domain. Microsoft is said to be investing 2.5 million dollars in the project.
A full story can be found here:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8DLQH2G0.htm?campaign_id=apn_ tech_down&chan=tc
Another similar project - LDS Digitizing Books, on-line NOW at BYU !!! The Family History Library is starting todigitize their book holdings, mostly family histories to date, andthey are putting them on-line, fully search able by any word oradvanced search combinations. Five thousand plus of these books are on the Brigham Young UniversityLibrary servers and readily accessible, NOW! Here is a partial clip of an announcement I just received "Â…the LDS Family History Library has announced that it has begun theprocess of digitizing and making available on the Internet all of theFamily History books in their collection. These are primarily books inthe "929.273Series" that are currently housed on the first floor ofthe Family History Library (previously housed on the fourth floor ofthe Joseph Smith Memorial Building). At the present time (September2005), about 5000 books have been digitized and are available, andthey have announced that they are adding about 100 titles a week tothe on-line collection. Copyright issues are playing a role indetermining the order in which they progress through this task; booksout of copyright are being done first." Go to the web site of the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU athttp://www.lib.byu.edu/ , then on the home page, follow the links:Find Other Materials; Electronic; On Line Collections at BYU; TextCollections tab; Family History Archive from the list of collections that are displayed. Tim Stowell