Open Library homepage in September 2011
|Slogan||One web page for every book.|
Type of site
|Digital library index|
|11px 16,427 (April 2014[update])|
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, among others, Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.
It provides access to many public domain and out-of-print books, which can be read online.
Book database and digital lending library
Its book information is collected from the Library of Congress, other libraries, and Amazon.com, as well as from user contributions through a Wiki-like interface. If books are available in digital form, a button labelled "Read" appears next to its catalog listing. Links to where books can be purchased or borrowed are also provided.
There are different entities in the database:
- works (which are the aggregate of all books with the same title and text)
- editions (which are different publications of the corresponding works)
Open Library claims to have 6 million authors and 20 million books (not works), and about one million public domain books available as digitized books. Tens of thousands of modern books were made available from 4 and then 150 libraries and publishers for digital lending.
Open Library began in 2006 with Aaron Swartz as the original engineer and leader of Open Library's technical team. The project was led by George Oates from April 2009 to December 2011. Oates was responsible for a complete site redesign during her tenure.
The site was redesigned and relaunched in May 2010. Its codebase is on GitHub. The site uses Infobase, its own database framework based on PostgreSQL, and Infogami, its own Wiki engine written in Python. The source code to the site is published under the Affero General Public License, version 3.
Books for the blind and dyslexic
The website was relaunched adding ADA compliance and offering over 1 million modern and older books to the print disabled in May 2010 using the DAISY Digital Talking Book. Under federal law in the United States, libraries are allowed to make copyrighted books available to people with disabilities so newer titles can become available.
- Online Computer Library Center – creator of WorldCat
- Google Book Search
- Free Software licensing
- List of AGPL web applications
- "Openlibrary.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
- "A library bigger than any building". BBC News. 2007-07-31. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
- Grossman, Wendy M (2009-01-22). "Why you can't find a library book in your search engine". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 2010-07-06.
- About Us (Open Library)
- Digital Lending Launch
- In-Library eBook Lending Launched
- George (Open Library)
- OpenLibrary source code on GitHub
- About the Technology (Open Library)
- Developers / Licensing — Open Library
- LICENSE file on the OpenLibrary GitHub repository
- Brooke Donald, Associated Press, in U-T San Diego, May 4, 2010
- "Welcome to Daisy Books for the Print Disabled". Internet Archive. Retrieved 10 December 2012.