MARCUS WOHLSEN
Stuff.co.nz 02/08/2011
Image - Getty
A HUGE TASK: Brewster Kahle is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.
Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.
Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.
"There is always going to be a role for books," said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. "We want to see books live forever."
So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about 1 million titles, each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides.
That's far fewer than the nearly 130 million different books Google engineers involved in that company's book scanning project estimate to exist worldwide. But Kahle says the ease with which they've acquired the first half-million donated texts makes him optimistic about reaching what he sees as a realistic goal of 10 million books, the equivalent of a major university library.
Full story at stuff.co.nz
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