Aaron Swartz: Announcing the Open Library | Hacker News Reader

Aaron Swartz: Announcing the Open Library

aaronsw.com

19 pointsabstractbill25 comments

Disclosure: I work at the Internet Archive, but only speak for myself here.

I can understand the confusion given the news.yc context, but some of these comments miss the point. The Open Library is a library, not a startup, and is hosted at the nonprofit Internet Archive[1]. It is thus more of an analogue to Wikipedia -- which it complements in the books domain -- than Scribd.

Entrepreneurial hackers might be interested in the sweep of its mission: catalog every book ever made, using a combination of preexisting data sources and volunteer contributions, and offer free high-quality downloads of full book contents wherever possible. They might be interested in the detailed UI design doc[2], covering the vision for the project's functionality.

They might even be interested in the technology: a new loosely-structured dynamically extensible wiki, with integrated full-text search of both catalog entries and book text -- and all open source[3].

- Gordon

[1] http://www.archive.org

[2] http://demo.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/ui

[3] http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/tech http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/architecture

Do you have a plan for making books that are currently copyrighted available for download? Will it be limited to public domain/CC licensed books?

Is there any way that I would ever be able to borrow one of the Harry Potter books from your library? Are you focusing on cataloging the information about books or are you focusing on making books available to people?

You should really read the Open Library site for the best idea of what its ambitions include. (Just as I'm not speaking for the Internet Archive, where my project is web archiving, I'm not speaking for the Open Library, either.)

This is clearly the most important question.

I am reminded of similar hyping and grandiose claims that Aaron made when he announced both Infogami and web.py. He eventually abandoned Infogami and the main user of web.py - Reddit, has switched to something else.

I really hope he sticks with this. Aaron is a smart guy and it is a shame to see him just leaving behind all these half-finished projects.

Anybody know if infogami went to Conde Nast as well? Nobody's answering their support emails.

Ordinarily I would just leave it behind as a lost cause, but one of the sites I created keeps accumulating spam, and I need the brief attention of someone at the server to take care of it. The thought of junk accumulating on permalinks I created makes me feel dirty..

Infogami (Aaron Swartz) merged with reddit and became reddit.

You can try emailing Aaron Swartz but I'm not sure if he is interested in maintaining infogami. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/interruptdriven

I didn't know Reddit switched away from web.py. Do you know what they switched to?

Django I think.

When did reddit switch? I wasn't able to find any reference to that. As of January 2007, it was still web.py:

http://reddit.com/info/vovg/comments

The kiss-to-ass ratio on that site is just too, too high.

"Hey, everyone, I've come up with a completely banal and already-been-done idea."

Oh, mmm, mmm, Aaron you're so smart, mmm...SMAAck Kiss!

While wishing Aaron all the best, seriously, what the heck? Infogami 2.0 with Scribd's mission statement, yeah, great, super. This was on Daring Fireball, even.

Just because it has been done before doesn't make it not worth doing. Look at the iPod.

True enough. My problem is the oh-you're-such-a-genius vibe I get from the comments there. It's just something I've noticed time and time again throughout my life--people judge based almost entirely on perceived authority, reputation, and past performance. Oddly, it's something that seems to get worse as IQ levels rise.

Now, he's smart enough to pay attention to--I won't fault anyone for that--but when he comes up with an idea that was started by PG (project gutenberg) in 1971 (!) it just ain't a work of genius.

The hard part of a project like this is dedicating years to building it into something large. The programming challenges are relatively trivial next to the total work involved. I'll believe he's serious about this project if he sticks with it after most of the fun technical challenges are solved.

"champagne has a disgusting taste" <-- He can't be serious!

Aaron Swartz, Supertaster.

Wot, 0 points? I'm being serious. It's like the one thing I remember from having read his weblog before:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/eatandcode

From one of the comments:

> Amazon is NOT the place to store information on the world's books!

This Brewster Kahle, isn't he still working at Amazon-owned Alexa?

No. Kahle co-founded Alexa in 1996, which was sold to Amazon in 1999. Now, he leads the independent non-profit Internet Archive.

- Gordon (who works at the Internet Archive but is speaking only for himself here)

Amazing - he went from utlra-evil to ultra-saint?

Alexa's the app that grabbed pages for the Internet Archive. So he was saintly all along.

I thought it is the Amazon Spyware, sorry for the confusion.

It's spyware with an altruistic motive. In Founders at Work the guy touched briefly on the ethics behind it and drawing the line.

Even more competition for Scribd.

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