While having worked on the project for several years, the Internet Archive recently announced it's Open Libarary project with the goal of offering freely accessible content from hundreds of thousands of digitized books. The project has an array of impressive partners but one is notable in its absence - Google, which has been pursing it's own digitization project:

An open-source rival to Google's book project

By Stefanie Olsen
October 25, 2005
ZDNet.com

...The Internet Archive only plans to scan books that are in the public domain and those that copyright holders have given the green light for scanning.

Though it has been working on the effort for years, the Internet Archive recently jump-started its effort by introducing the Open Content Alliance. Members include Adobe Systems, Columbia University, the European Archive, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Yahoo and MSN Search are also notable members, given their investments in Web search and driving traffic to their proprietary services. The two companies boasted the openness of the project Tuesday night, but their allegiance to the open-source project surely is a strategic counterbalance to Google's project. In the end, the open-source library will also be searchable using MSN Search and Yahoo.

Their support means donating money. MSN Search, for example, has committed approximately $5 million to ensure 150,000 books are scanned and added to the collection over the next year.

Last week, the Internet Archive launched Open Library, a Web site that will eventually house all the world's books, according to the nonprofit. It now demonstrates the project with 15 digitized works. The Web site's interface is modeled after that of the British Library in the United Kingdom.

The foundation will digitize 18,000 works of fiction chosen from the University of California archive project that are no longer bound by copyright....

The full article, with further details about the project and its non-rivalry with Google's similar venture, check out the full article.

-- MDT