The Million Book Project initiated by Carnegie Mellon University has reportedly crossed the 1.5 millionth book scanning milestone. Launched nearly a decade ago by computer scientists at the university, the project seeks to digitise the published works of humankind and make them freely available online. Of the over 1.5 million books, many are in Chinese, and thousands more are being scanned daily.
Most of the recent work in the Million Book Project was executed by workers at scanning centres in China and India. The project received $3.5 million in seed funding from the US National Science Foundation. Computer hardware and software providers have also contributed in kind. In addition, the US, India and China have each contributed $10 million.
Books have been borrowed for scanning from various institutions and individuals worldwide, though institutions in Europe have declined to participate. The project has covered books published in 20 languages, including 970,000 in Chinese, 360,000 in English, 50,000 in the southern Indian language of Telugu and 40,000 in Arabic. Though Carnegie Mellon representatives claim theirs is the largest university-based digital library of free books, the project is not the first of its kind. Similar endeavors have been initiated by online search engine operator Google Inc. and software firm Microsoft Corp.
More News in this Theme
