Online library offers 1.5 million works and counting

The Universal Digital Library, project backed by major libraries around the world, offers more than 1.5 million digital books free to the public. It offers full text downloads in HTML, TIFF, and DjVu formats.

There are plenty of websites that offers free books in the public domain, chief among them is Project Gutenberg and Google Books. The Universal Digital Library (UDL) project does the same but without the controversy of copyright problems, all the books in its list are available in public domain and have authors’ consent. The copyrighted books are also digitized but only abstracts are provided for those titles and will be released to the public once the copyright expires.

The UDL partially funded by National Science Foundation, includes books from major institutions such as Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, Carnegie Mellon University, Zhejiang University in China, Indian Institute of Science in India, Seven other Chinese universities and eight other Indian universities are also partners. It is a surprise Google is not in this list, they could have helped them handily. The site is slow because of this news, Google could have helped them with Servers. But UDL decided to go alone.

Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and director of intellectual property for the Universal Digital Library (UDL).

You're not going to find over 900,000 works in Chinese on Google,"

According to Shamos, they are not interested in gaining more customers, but a site where any one can get free books from any where. UDL offers in three formats, PDF, TIFF and DjVu (pronounced déjà vu is an alternative format for PDF). Google projects contains both free and paid versions offers in PDF format only.

The UDL makes it easy for the users to download the books and offers a comprehensive source of rare books that are not available in general along with classic books. He quotes an example “ancient archery” which you may not find in regular sources, whereas in UDL you can find a range of books on that topic. Also Microsoft is doing a similar project, but with limited choices of books.

Another main reason for this UDL project is preservation, we have all seen in history how the original Alexandria library was burnt down by a fire and precious books lost. UDL will stores its content in multiple places, so once digitized it will be forever preserved and it will be impossible for any person or governments to destroy this.

The UDL project was started five years ago by Raj Reddy, Carnegie Mellon Computer Science and Robotics professor and others. Raj Reddy has been awarded the ACM Turing Award and French Legion of Honor.

It is a great start, with various universities combining you will not only see English books but also other languages and books from different countries as well. It will make one giant World library.