Alexandria II ~ the great cyber-library

[ROM-DOS]

From The New York Times Magazine article "Scan This Book" By KEVIN KELLY

"The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it."

"Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone

[Dark06]

Free ebooks have been available 4 some time

but it nebver caught on

I have read a few hole books from pds

either way its a crazy idea to archive every piece of lititure ever composed

there would be so much crap

[resopalrabotnick]

but having everything ever written, or rather everything still in existence catalogued and available as a text with a search engine to hunt through it... awesome idea.

but nothing like grabbing an old paperback and curling up in bed...

[ROM-DOS]

Available soon

". . .the [url=http://products.sel.sony.com/pa/prs/index.html?DCMP=reader&HQS=showcase_reader]Sony

[tommie gorman]

Would that include porn?

Really, a good find ROM-DOS, would be interesting to view the original scrolls and other stuff. Without having to leave home. Maybe lay back with a little Zane Gray. Cool.