Hello! I’ve just joined the Open Library team as Project Lead. In this, my second week, I’m still finding my feet and getting to know everyone. The future looks really, really bright thanks to the amazing foundation already in place at Open Library. We have around 23 million books in our catalogue, over 1 million of which are available to read or download for free right now. The team has done an absolutely amazing job of drawing catalogue records from disparate libraries and connecting them all under openlibrary.org.

As I was finding my way last week, it just so happened that Brewster Kahle was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! about the current state of the Google Books Settlement – the perfect induction! (Brewster’s interview starts at around 13:55 minutes in.)

This blog post by Ryan Singel also came in handy: The Fight over the Google of all Libraries: A Wired FAQ.