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Internet Archive Turns Twenty, Adds Full-Text Search and New Book Reader

screen-shot-2016-10-23-at-11-10-52The internet’s attic has reached a milestone few web properties will ever be able to match; it is turning twenty this year.

The IA touted the milestone in a blog post today where it announced several upgraded features:

  • Thanks to the efforts of Giovanni Damiola, full-text search through all books hosted on the Internet Archive is back online and is faster than ever. You can try the new feature, for example, to see over 115,000 places where works reference Benjamin Franklin’s maxim: “Little strokes fell great oaks”.
  • Thanks to Richard Carceres, we have a beautiful new Book Reader, which looks great on mobile devices and provides a much clearer and simpler book borrowing experience. Try out the new Book Reader and see for yourself!
  • In the processing of adding hundreds of thousands of new modern works to the Open Library catalog, Mek Karpeles released our new openlibrary-client, a command line developer tool for programmatically fetching and creating new works on Open Library.

They also announced that patrons who borrowed ebooks from the Open Library could now do so from inside the BookReader webapp. Users can also switch between Epub and PDF formats, or return the ebook early.

Launched by Brewster Kahle in May 1996 (according to Wikipedia), the site now hosts copies of tens of millions of books, websites, games, apps, and other material, including specialized collections like the thousands of old video games running in emulators.

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Comments


Chris Meadows October 25, 2016 um 3:09 am

I’m still mystified how the relatively-sparsely-funded Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary can continue to get away with rampant copyright infringement by scanning and checking out ebooks when multi-zillionaire Google’s attempt to just scan them for a search engine spawned a ten year lawsuit.


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