Open Library

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Open Library
OpenLibrarypage.jpg
Screenshot (September 2011)
URL openlibrary.org
Slogan One web page for every book.
Commercial? no
Type of site Digital library index
Registration free
Available language(s) English
Created by Aaron Swartz
Launched 2006 (2006)
Alexa rank negative increase 10,858 (May 2012)[1]
Revenue donation
Current status Active

Open Library is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

Contents

Books for the blind and dyslexic

The website was relaunched adding ADA compliance and offering over 1 million modern and older books to the print disabled in May 2010.[2]

Digital lending library

Tens of thousands of modern books were made available from 4[3] and then 150 libraries and publishers[4] for digital lending.

Book database

Its book information is collected from the Library of Congress, other libraries, and Amazon.com, as well as from user contributions through a Wiki-like interface. If books are available in digital form, a button labelled "Read" appears next to its catalog listing. Links to where books can be purchased or borrowed are also provided.

There are different entities in the database:

  • authors
  • works (which are the aggregate of all books with the same title and text)
  • editions (which are different publications of the corresponding works)

Open Library claims to have 6 million authors and 20 million books (not works), and about one million Public Domain books are available as digitized books[5].

Technical

Open Library began in 2006 with Aaron Swartz as the original engineer and leader of Open Library's technical team.[6][7] The project is now led by George Oates.[8]

The site was redesigned and relaunched in May 2010. Its codebase is on GitHub. The site uses Infobase, its own database framework based on PostgreSQL, and Infogami, its own Wiki engine written in Python.[9] The source code to the site is published under the Affero General Public License, version 3.[10][11]

See also

References

External links


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