An open-source rival to Google's book scheme

When it comes to digitising books, there appears to be two stories unfolding: one is about open source and the other is about Google.

Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive in San Francisco on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institute, Hewlett-Packard, MSN and Yahoo, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitise all the world's books and make them universally available.

Google was noticeably absent from the cadre of partners, considering that the search behemoth has a high-profile project of its own to scan library books and add them to its searchable index.

Some supporters of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, took the opportunity to criticise such private ventures.

"We want to digitise all human knowledge... and we can't risk having it privatised," said Doron Weber, an executive of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that has contributed more than $3m to the Internet Archive since 2003. Citing the importance of an open library for educational purposes, he called on private companies to "rein in their impulses" while urging libraries to "embrace the future".

Still, a Google executive in attendance downplayed the perceived rivalry.

"I think the project is great," said Alexander Macgillivray, Google's senior product counsel, following a presentation on the book-scanning effort. "It's a shame it's being portrayed as a battle between the two projects because the efforts are complementary."

Digitising books has become a focus in recent years as people try to make otherwise analogue information available on the Internet. Academic research, music from classical to pop and video are all being digitised, and now books are in technology's sights.

Google put its own far-reaching digitisation project in the spotlight ten months ago, when it announced partnerships with Harvard University, Stanford University and others to digitise collections of copyrighted and out-of-copyright books. In 2004, Amazon also opened up a digital book collection on its Web site and announced its efforts to scan popular works in partnership with publishers. Visitors to Amazon can "search inside the book" as a result.

Still, to make the millions of books in the world available online is a Herculean task. Issues of publisher copyrights, labour costs, data storage and backup must still be thrashed out. It would take 6 petabytes to digitally store just 1 million books, according to the Internet Archive. By comparison, Google reportedly has stored nearly 10 million Web documents, requiring between 1.7 and 5 petabytes of storage.

One thorny issue has already reached the courts. Google faces lawsuits from publishers and authors that claim it is violating their copyrights and overstepping the boundaries of fair use laws. Google has made scanning books an 'opt-out' programme for publishers, meaning that they must actively tell the search company not to scan their books to stay out of the company's Web index.

The Internet Archive only plans to scan books that are in the public domain and those that copyright holders have given the green light for scanning.