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Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end
street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an
endangered species: the printed word.
Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to
save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer
scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and
share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever
published.
“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched
on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a
climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000
volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live
forever.”
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So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse
itself is large enough to hold about 1 million titles, each one given a
barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container
in which it resides.
That‘s far fewer than the roughly 130 million different books Google
engineers involved in that company’s book scanning project estimate to
exist worldwide. But Kahle says the ease with which they’ve acquired the
first half-million donated texts makes him optimistic about reaching
what he sees as a realistic goal of 10 million, the equivalent of a
major university library.
“The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever
published. We’re not going to get there, but that’s our goal,” he said.
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