Description
The Million Book Project was a 501(c)3 charity organization with various scanning centers throughout the world.
By December 2007, more than 1.5 million books had been scanned, in 20 languages: 970,000 in Chinese; 360,000 in English; 50,000 in Telugu; and 40,000 in Arabic. Most of the books are in the public domain, but permission has been acquired to include over 60,000 copyrighted books (roughly 53,000 in English and 7,000 in Indian languages). The books are mirrored in part at sites in India, China, Carnegie Mellon, the Internet Archive, Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The books that have been scanned to date are not yet all available online, and no single site has copies of all the books that are available online.
The million book project was a "proof of concept" that has largely been replaced by Google Book Search and the Internet Archive book scanning projects.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Carnegie Mellon $3.63M over four years for equipment and administrative travel for the Million Book Project. India provided $25M annually to support language translation research projects. The Ministry of Education in China provided $8.46M over three years. The Internet Archive provided equipment, staff and money. The University of California Libraries at Merced funded the work to acquire copyright permission from U.S. publishers.
Read more about this topic: Million Book Project
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)