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Millions of books exist - and he wants to collect them all [Virginian - Pilot](Virginian - Pilot Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) By Marcus Wohlsen The Associated Press RICHMOND, Calif. 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. Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-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," Kahle said 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 roughly 130 million different books estimated to exist worldwide by engineers involved in Google's book- scanning project. 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, the equivalent of a major university library. "The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published," he said. "We're not going to get there, but that's our goal." Recently, workers in offices above the warehouse floor unpacked boxes of books and entered information on each title into a database. The books ranged from "Moby Dick" and "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" to "The Complete Basic Book of Home Decorating" and "Costa Rica for Dummies." At this early stage in the book collection process, specific titles aren't being sought out so much as large collections. Duplicate copies of books already in the archive are redonated elsewhere. If someone does need to see a physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should take no more than an hour to fetch it from its dark, dry home. "Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said. "First it was in people's memories, then it was in manuscripts, then printed books, then microfilm, CD-ROMS, now on the digital Internet. Each one of these generations is very important." Each new format as it emerges tends to be hailed as the end-all way to package information. But Kahle points out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere. He sees saving the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future. Along with keeping books cool and dry, which Kahle plans to accomplish using the modified shipping containers, book preservation experts say he'll have to contend with vermin and about a century's worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that decays over time because of its own acidity. (c) 2011 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |