Yahoo-backed group plans online library of books, film

Yahoo has thrown its weight behind a San Francisco group that hopes to develop an online library of digitized texts and films in the public domain, available for download and reuse in high resolution formats.

The company is one of a number of organizations supporting the Open Content Alliance, which plans to set up an online archive bringing together existing digital collections of books and films, and to add new works to the archive.

Adobe Systems and Hewlett-Packard will supply software. Books will be provided by the University of Toronto and O’Reilly Media, and films by the Prelinger Archives and the U.K.’s National Archives. Yahoo will index that content, and fund the digitization of a collection of American literature selected by the University of California, according to an announcement posted to Yahoo’s official blog on Sunday by Brewster Kahle.

As founder of the Internet Archive, another of the organizations involved in the project, Kahle has experience indexing huge volumes of data. The Internet Archive operates an online service called the Wayback Machine, which contains a series of snapshots of entire Web sites chronicling the development of the Internet medium.

The cost of the book and film archive will be borne by the companies contributing the content, or by other sponsors such as Yahoo, Kahle wrote. With that funding model, the library should be able to store millions of books, films and audio recordings, he added.

The library should be ready to offer its first digital content by the end of the year.

Some of the works will be released under one or other of the Creative Commons licenses, which allow artistic works to be distributed or reused under certain conditions. In this way, third parties could transform some of the classic books in the digital library into audio books, or reprint them and offer them for sale, without additional permission, Kahle wrote.

The group plans to demonstrate book scanning and other technologies it will use at an event on Oct. 25.

The Open Content Alliance’s digital library is not the only one under construction. Google Inc. is building another, Google Print, for which it plans to digitize millions of books, including some still covered by copyright. However, Google has attracted criticism from various publishing industry groups, including the U.S.-based The Authors Guild, which has filed a lawsuit to stop the service. Google maintains that the portions of copyright works it will show through Google Print are covered under laws relating to fair use.