The Internet Archive is having an old-fashioned Book Drive to gather donations to supplement our digital book archive. If you post a book (or three) to the Internet Archive Book Drive, 300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118, we’ll scan it and add it to the Archive. Thanks to existing foundation funding, we are also sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books that are donated in this Book Drive. We are also seeking financial support to continue the scanning operations that the Internet Archive has been doing for some years now.
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Over 1 Million Digital Books Now Available Free to the Print-Disabled
More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, today the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books – from classic 19th Century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials – now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or otherwise visually impaired.
Relaunch is complete!
Hello! Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just begun the process of launching our redesigned Open Library site. This may mean that there are a few hiccups along the way, but we hope to be through the woods as soon as possible.
We’ll post back here as soon as it’s stable, and in the meantime, If you spot anything obviously broken or weird, please leave us a comment.
Update, 6:56PM: OK. It’s been about 3 hours since we flipped the switch, and the new site seems to be holding together. Yay! We’ll be posting more about the redesign over the coming days – there are a ton of changes we’d like to highlight specifically, like the fact that we’ve shifted to using CC0 for any edits made to the records on Open Library.
Please be aware there are a few features which have been put on ice temporarily – full text search and managing the site in multiple languages for example. We want to devote proper attention to improving those features as soon as we can. They will return!
More to come…
Open Library URLs are changing
We are in the process of upgrading the openlibrary.org website to include the new functionality.
As part of this upgrade, the URLs of the openlibrary.org website will change from /a/, /b/, /l/ and /user/ to /authors/, /books/, /languages/ and /people/ respectively. After this change, the old URLs will get redirected to the new ones.
We are not anticipating any downtime during this process. However, there could be momentary failures in loading some pages.
We’ll post here once the change is over.