Darnton: A Digital Library Better Than Google’s

This was the title of a _NY Times_ op-ed piece by Robert Darnton in this morning’s paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/opinion/24darnton.html?_r=1&ref=opinion . From the article:

“Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the
books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a
digital public library, which would provide these digital copies
free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial,
technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved…

A coalition of foundations could come up with the money (estimates
of digitizing one page vary enormously, from 10 cents to $10 or
more), and a coalition of research libraries could supply the books.
The library would respect copyright, of course, and it probably
would exclude works that are now in print unless their authors
wanted to make them available. It would include orphan books,
assuming that Congress passed legislation to free them for
non-commercial use in a genuinely public library. ”

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