Kahle: Universal access to all human knowledge is possible

Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive and one of the great heroes of the copyfight) just delivered an amazing presentation at the Web 2.0 conference, called Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. It lays out Brewster's plan to see to it that all the information ever created in the world is stored and made available forever. Here are my running notes:

Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not a non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything), Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc.

26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about $60K and takes up one bookshelf.

Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing).

It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too.

A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive -- to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all the books.

Link

Update: The Weblogs, Inc Web 2.0 blog has got Brewster's talk in MP3 as well as plenty o' pix.