
Aaron Swartz:  Announcing the Open Library - abstractbill
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary
======
gojomo
Disclosure: I work at the Internet Archive, but only speak for myself here.

I can understand the confusion given the news.yc context, but some of these
comments miss the point. The Open Library is a library, not a startup, and is
hosted at the nonprofit Internet Archive[1]. It is thus more of an analogue to
Wikipedia -- which it complements in the books domain -- than Scribd.

Entrepreneurial hackers might be interested in the sweep of its mission:
catalog every book ever made, using a combination of preexisting data sources
and volunteer contributions, and offer free high-quality downloads of full
book contents wherever possible. They might be interested in the detailed UI
design doc[2], covering the vision for the project's functionality.

They might even be interested in the technology: a new loosely-structured
dynamically extensible wiki, with integrated full-text search of both catalog
entries and book text -- and all open source[3].

\- Gordon

[1] <http://www.archive.org>

[2] <http://demo.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/ui>

[3] <http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/tech>
<http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/architecture>

~~~
rms
Do you have a plan for making books that are currently copyrighted available
for download? Will it be limited to public domain/CC licensed books?

Is there any way that I would ever be able to borrow one of the Harry Potter
books from your library? Are you focusing on cataloging the information about
books or are you focusing on making books available to people?

~~~
gojomo
You should really read the Open Library site for the best idea of what its
ambitions include. (Just as I'm not speaking for the Internet Archive, where
my project is web archiving, I'm not speaking for the Open Library, either.)

------
AF
I am reminded of similar hyping and grandiose claims that Aaron made when he
announced both Infogami and web.py. He eventually abandoned Infogami and the
main user of web.py - Reddit, has switched to something else.

I really hope he sticks with this. Aaron is a smart guy and it is a shame to
see him just leaving behind all these half-finished projects.

~~~
akkartik
Anybody know if infogami went to Conde Nast as well? Nobody's answering their
support emails.

Ordinarily I would just leave it behind as a lost cause, but one of the sites
I created keeps accumulating spam, and I need the brief attention of someone
at the server to take care of it. The thought of junk accumulating on
permalinks I created makes me feel dirty..

~~~
rms
Infogami (Aaron Swartz) merged with reddit and became reddit.

You can try emailing Aaron Swartz but I'm not sure if he is interested in
maintaining infogami. <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/interruptdriven>

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mynameishere
The kiss-to-ass ratio on that site is just too, too high.

"Hey, everyone, I've come up with a completely banal and already-been-done
idea."

Oh, mmm, mmm, Aaron you're so smart, mmm...SMAAck Kiss!

~~~
palish
Just because it has been done before doesn't make it not worth doing. Look at
the iPod.

~~~
mynameishere
True enough. My problem is the oh-you're-such-a-genius vibe I get from the
comments there. It's just something I've noticed time and time again
throughout my life--people judge based almost entirely on perceived authority,
reputation, and past performance. Oddly, it's something that seems to get
worse as IQ levels rise.

Now, he's smart enough to pay attention to--I won't fault anyone for that--but
when he comes up with an idea that was started by PG (project gutenberg) in
1971 (!) it just ain't a work of genius.

------
staunch
The hard part of a project like this is dedicating years to building it into
something large. The programming challenges are relatively trivial next to the
total work involved. I'll believe he's serious about this project if he sticks
with it after most of the fun technical challenges are solved.

------
gibsonf1
_"champagne has a disgusting taste"_ <\-- He can't be serious!

~~~
zach
Aaron Swartz, Supertaster.

~~~
zach
Wot, 0 points? I'm being serious. It's like the one thing I remember from
having read his weblog before:

<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/eatandcode>

------
euccastro
From one of the comments:

> Amazon is NOT the place to store information on the world's books!

This Brewster Kahle, isn't he still working at Amazon-owned Alexa?

~~~
gojomo
No. Kahle co-founded Alexa in 1996, which was sold to Amazon in 1999. Now, he
leads the independent non-profit Internet Archive.

\- Gordon (who works at the Internet Archive but is speaking only for himself
here)

~~~
Tichy
Amazing - he went from utlra-evil to ultra-saint?

~~~
aston
Alexa's the app that grabbed pages for the Internet Archive. So he was saintly
all along.

~~~
Tichy
I thought it is the Amazon Spyware, sorry for the confusion.

~~~
jward
It's spyware with an altruistic motive. In Founders at Work the guy touched
briefly on the ethics behind it and drawing the line.

------
nickb
Even more competition for Scribd.

