Earlier, I wrote about a project that’s set out to digitize books in the public domain. The Open Library Project is working on doing just that as well. Google is also working on Google Print in an effort to digitize all known human knowledge. Yahoo and Microsoft, again late to the party, is playing catch up by leveraging the Open Library Project. It’s always fun to see for-profit enterprises hiding behind non-profit efforts only to find ways to make profit out of the venture later. But that’s not to say what Google is doing is all for the good of mankind either. They’ll probably find ways to stick unsuspecting ads in the reading of “Declaration of Independence“.
News.com has a facinating article about the whole war on digitizing the human knowledge.
Another project referred to in the article worth mentioning again is LibriVox, an open source project that is working on free audio books. With so many open source projects going on, it seems like the world is moving towards a “StarTrek Economy“ where things are not driven by money, but the common good of all beings. Sounds like a socialist movement to me.