Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

The Internet Archive has also set up another project called The
Open Library, which aims to create an online database of every book
ever published (featuring bibliographic details, summaries and tables
of contents, all entered by users) – something of an open-source version
of WorldCat, the worldwide database integrating the catalogues
of more than ten thousand libraries, totalling 150 million records. The
final piece of the Internet Archive puzzle is the Open Content Alliance,
a collaborative effort of public institutions and corporations whose
stated goal is to “build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized
text and multimedia material”.
The Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle describes his vision
as follows:
“Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their
culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no
memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures.
Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form.
The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create
an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.”
On a smaller and more focused scale, various independent efforts
appear to be following a similar approach. For example, the library
of the University of Pennsylvania (sponsored by Kirtas Technologies,
a scanning and digitisation business), is scanning its 200,000 publicdomain
titles, and selling copies through a print-on-demand service.
The Emory University is also digitising and uploading public-domain
titles (beginning with those selected by its librarians), so that scholars
can access the texts online for free – or order a print-on-demand
edition, the proceedings of which are used to cover the costs of the
digitising programme. 269 Furthermore, there are several independent
and peer-to-peer efforts designed to collectively share high-quality
scans of books, such as the popular Gigapedia.com (recently renamed
Library.nu) which hosts some 420,000 books in searchable and freely
downloadable form. 270 And even the Holy Grail of theoretical and philosophical
texts – the galaxy of academic papers and books produced
since the 19th century – is being digitised in an apparently collective
process and posted on the subversive website AAAAARG.ORG. 271 On
the other end of the spectrum, we find digital archives being sold as a
‘product’, such as the The Playboy Cover to Cover Hard Drive which
collects all 650 issues of Playboy magazine up until 2010: 56 years,
100,000 pages, on a single custom-designed hard disk, for $299.95. 272
All these initiatives produce readable scanned images of book or
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