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CHENNAI, Dec. 26

IN about five years from now, about a million books of all the significant literary, artistic and scientific works in India would be digitally preserved and freely available on the Internet. This is part of the Million Book Project in India initiated by the Carnegie Mellon University along with the Government of India.

Dr Raj Reddy, University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, told newspersons here on Thursday that about 20,000 books had been digitised in the last six months. The whole project was likely to be completed by 2006, he added.

The $30-million project is mainly funded by the US Government, and supported by the Governments of India and China (in China too a similar project is going on).

In India, the digitising of books has been going on in libraries across Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and at the Allahabad University. The States' contribution was mainly by way of providing manpower, he said.

According to Dr Reddy, the Million Book project, which is likely to be named as Digital Library of India, was part of a universal digital library started by CMU a decade ago.

Globally, there are about 10 million unique book and document editions before 1900, and about 100 million since the beginning of recorded history. Preserving such a volume would be possible only with digital technology. The task was within the reach of a single concerted effort for the public good, and this effort could be distributed to libraries, museums, and other groups in all countries, he added.

According to Dr Reddy, existing archives of paper have many shortcomings. Many other works still in existence today are rare, and only accessible to a small population including scholars and collectors at specific geographic locations. Digital technology can make the works accessible to the billions of people all over the world. Any book can be downloaded free of cost, he added.

On the issue of copyright, Dr Reddy, who is Founder and Director of the Universal Digital Library (UDL), said that the online version of the books was available for free, while a fee would be collected for printer versions.

Dr Reddy said that currently in India about 40 scanning stations are scanning books at the rate of 10,000 pages per day. "Our goal is to have about 100 stations in 10 cities to scan about a million pages every day," he said. Recently, a full load of books in a container arrived from the US for scanning, he added.

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