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Preethi J

The Million Book Digital Library project seeks to make available a huge number of books for online reading.

It is said that a book can change the way thousands live. May be millions is more appropriate in this age, considering the reach of the Internet.

E-books and massive online libraries with titles that range across all topics and sub-topics are available at the click of a button over the World Wide Web.

With the Million Book Digital Library project, Professor Raj Reddy and others at Carnegie Mellon University are attempting to make a million books accessible to anybody, for free, online.

At a symposium recently held by Microsoft Research in Bangalore, Prof Reddy informed the audience that currently 600,000 books from various centres in China, Egypt, Australia and across Europe had been scanned.

The US provided the scanners, while China and India provided the manpower, he said. By this year, the team will have the capacity to scan one million pages per day. The project is expected to be complete by 2007, when a million books will be uploaded.

Generating new jobs

Online libraries also bring in part-time jobs for the unemployed and the differently-abled. Prof Nick Moore, Chairman of Acumen, a research and consultancy company that studies the use of information in advanced societies, said, "Digital libraries may soon bring Indians a new job opportunity — that of data entry."

In the US, there are thousands of housewives and college students involved in temporary work as data entry operators for digital libraries.

All they need is an understanding of English, the ability to process some information and present it in simpler words.

preethij@thehindu.co.in

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