On MIT’s Technology Review, Nicholas Carr takes an in-depth look at the creation of the Digital Public Library of America, an attempt at a non-commercial universal electronic library (which I also mentioned last month) that hopes to provide universal access to as much of human knowledge as it can. Carr first looks at Google’s attempt to create Google Book Search, and the negotiated settlement that was thrown out as too overreaching. Though Google is moving ahead with its legal defense, the search market has shifted toward social networking meaning that a book search might not be as attractive to Google...

From the Internet Archive blog: The Internet has put universal access to knowledge within our grasp. Now we need to put all of the world’s literature online. This is easier to do than it might seem, if we resist the impulse to centralize and build only a few monolithic libraries. Centralization can lead to price controls, censorship without due process, lack of reader privacy, and resistance to innovators. We need lots of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers—and lots of libraries. If many actors work together, we can have a robust, distributed publishing and library system, possibly resembling the World Wide Web. The courts...

Ars Technica has a report on the Digital Public Library of America West conference from April 27th that seems to be a bit more informative than the Publishers Weekly summary we linked a week ago. Ars’s Megan Geuss reports on the challenge facing the organization, and some of the ideas presented at the event. The DPLA does have a tricky task ahead of it: The organization must be a bank of documents, and a vast sea of metadata; an advocate for the people, and a partner with publishing houses; a way to make location irrelevant to...

Although I’m still gung ho about the Digital Public Library of America, I retain some of the concerns arising in a recent MIT Technology Review article. For example, how can we  reconcile the DPLA’s various goals and serve academic and public library patrons, whose needs and interests may differ sharply? One strategy would be for public libraries, or a related nonprofit, maybe even the DPLA or a successor, to be able to buy the OverDrive distribution service, which reaches ‘more than 15,000 libraries, schools, and colleges worldwide.’ Talk up the idea well—always easier to do when a service and urgent needs already exist,...

From Publishers Weekly.  More in the article: On April 27, DPLA West brought together over 400 librarians, technologists, public policy advocates, and a very small number of publishers at the Internet Archive in San Francisco to discuss the progress of the most visible effort yet to forge a common digital library for both Americans and the world: the nascent Digital Public Library of America. The best thing about the meeting, the second major public gathering of the DPLA, was that it was full of hope and aspirations. Of course, that was also the worst thing about the DPLA meeting, too. Born of...

Why a bestselling writer would be an excellent addition to the steering committee of the Harvard-hosted Digital Public Library of America: " Like it or not, a lot more public library patrons care about bestsellers and other commercial books than about academic works. Frustratingly, the Harvard-hosted Digital Public Library of America has no commercial writer or other nonacademic content provider on its 17-member steering committee. Nick Taylor, a prominent member of the Authors Guild, is wondering about writerly participation, and I don’t blame him. I raised a similar question in a Baltimore Sun article. Granted, writers can be overzealous in trying to protect...

From an article in Publishers Weekly: Scholar and Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton vowed that the Digital Public Library of America, a nonprofit, nationwide effort to digitize and offer access to millions of free, digitized books and special collections would launch by April of 2013. “I make this promise to you,” Darnton said at the close of his talk, entitled “Digitize, Democratize: Libraries and the Future of Books": “We will get this done.” ... As for the DPLA, Darnton said the steering committee was wrestling with the issues of getting the project going, noting that copyright-related issues were the biggest challenge. The DPLA must...

  Been there. Done that. Some years ago I cofounded a noncommercial startup called LibraryCity—the same name as this Web site—to try to get millions of books online. We ran into a little complication: Google’s book side blew us away. LibraryCity did prod the International Digital Publishing Forum into getting serious about e-book standards, by way of ePub. But as small-fry, not wired into the worlds of the super-rich, big business, foundations, and national politics, we lacked the clout to promulgate our own standards and build the digital library. Now another grassroots startup, Library Renewal, led by Michael “Library Man” Porter, wants to...

While the Digital Public Library of America has been fixated on arcane library-and-museum concerns, Apple is unveiling an e-format that might lock in millions of teachers and students in the U.S. and elsewhere Very possibly the new multimedia book product may ultimately jack up costs in K-12 and elsewhere. The new format will let students rotate and explore 3D objects, among other features. That’s good. But via hardware-related exclusives, Apple for now is locking up the new related to the hilt, playing up the ease of authoring for the format. Probable result? Higher hardware prices for schools, students, businesses and consumers than otherwise,...

  In my series on e-books for family literacy, I’ve emphasized the glories of human contact—as opposed to parents simply using e-books as babysitters. Here’s a somewhat related example of the possibilities of E. In-person book clubs for kids. Recording a promotional YouTube for Sony, author Lori Gottlieb offered generic tips such as the need to round up kids with similar interests and then focus on those topics in the club. But she also threw in some e-book specific idea such as use of the built-in dictionaries and annotation tools. I can see young students using paper equivalents, too, if they prefer—choices...

From the press release: The Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund today announced a major contribution for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in the form of combined $5 million in funding. The DPLA Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Peter Baldwin, Chair of the Donor Board at the Arcadia Fund, made the announcement at the DPLA plenary meeting today in...

From DigitalKoans: The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana have agreed to collaborate to make their systems interoperable, to share source code, and to engage in cooperative collection building. Here's an excerpt from the press release: Robert Darnton, a DPLA Steering Committee member and University Librarian at Harvard, said, "The association between the DPLA and Europeana means that users everywhere will eventually have access to the combined riches of the two systems at a single click. The aggregated databases will include many millions of books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, images, recordings, videos, and other materials in many...