An excellent article that accurately summarizes certain developments that are occurring with online libraries. I should know because I am the founder of Bookyards ( http://www.bookyards.com ), a library that has been online for the past eight years and is one of the first to explore the commercial possibilities for libraries on the internet.
The only thing that I can add to the article are the following …. a historical perspective, and pointing out certain trends that are not explained in your article.
When we first started there were only a handful of libraries, with a limited readership. Today, there are over 800 legal libraries (the list is at http://www.bookyards.com/categories.html?type=links&category_id=1522 ), and approximately 150 online “pirate” libraries (online libraries that are providing books without respecting copyright law). Today’s overall readership for online books runs in the millions.
The content that was available 8 years ago was approximately 30,000 online books. Today, I would estimate that there are over a million English books online.
But the problem with today’s online libraries are the following:
(1) the content that is being accumulated, while overwhelming, is primarily material published before 1927 and is out of date. It is not only out of date, but …… and I am being polite ….. quite useless and not worth anyone’s time to look at.
(2) The format’s that are being used are not user friendly. PDF is preferred, but other formats such as DjVu now have been given priority.
(3) For most of these sites (Google and Universal Library) you cannot download the books.
(4) Copyright issues and legal problems have not been resolved, and it will be years before they are. This limits everything.
If this was the case, bookstores and libraries will be safe. But the threat that will be coming to libraries and bookstores will not be the projects that have been outlined by your article, but it will come from offshore online libraries that do not respect copyright laws, have modern books and content (some of them have present day bestsellers), are user friendly (use pdf), and can be downloaded (via through rapidshare and other file transferring services). Gigapedia ( http://gigapedia.org/ ) is a perfect example of this trend….. a Russian online library with thousands of English books that are copyrighted in the West but are available for free on their site.
Like Napster was for music, YouTube and p2p networks were for videos and movies, it is these “pirate” websites that will have a greater impact on books, libraries, and the publishers who produce them than online libraries such as Google, Universal Library, or Project Gutenberg.
