Internet Archivist Seeks One Copy of Every Book Ever Published

August 2nd, 2011

Here’s one for your Svalbard Seed Vault Gives Me The Willies file folder.

Via: AP:

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 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.”

Posted in Collapse, Elite, Technology | Top Of Page

One Response to “Internet Archivist Seeks One Copy of Every Book Ever Published”

  1. JWSmythe says:
    August 3, 2011 at 11:34 am

    I wish him the best. The Library of Congress has 22.1 million books cataloged. That’s only the ones they know about and have a copy.

    There are books that were published by little known authors and small publication groups. There are books that were self-published or from so long ago that no one has a copy, nor can we get one. There were quite a few ancient libraries that were destroyed over time, and books burned because they contained a contradictory viewpoint to the current leaders.

    The 22.1 million number only covers what the LoC has. Google has scanned in over 130 million books. The real number could reach into the billions.

    There are plenty of books where the only print copy was a limited run, and there may only be a handful of owners. Those owners recognize that they are holding on to extremely limited edition books, and they won’t part with them regardless of the money offered.

    The article says he has 500,000, and has room for 1 million. Interesting. That means he’s planning on collecting less than 1% of the books that we know about.

    What’s his end goal? To be a guy with a huge collection? I won’t dispute that it’s huge, but the LoC has full time staff acquiring and cataloging their books. They also have the luxury of a 2.1 million square foot library, and several annex buildings.

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