Egyptian government launches the world's largest digital library » MobyLives

"Last November the Egyptian government announced that it would soon launch the world’s largest digital library, the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), and according to Good e-Reader’s Michael Kozlowski, on January 10th, the el-Sisi government delivered. The EKB—for those of us who were maybe paying more attention to this same government’s not-so-tolerant purges against intolerance and censorship tactics last year—is a state-funded open source library made available for free to anyone with an Egyptian IP address. The digital library, which is being touted as the world’s largest—though as of right now we don’t actually know how many items are in its collection—holds costly subscriptions to a number of major publishers such as Springer Nature, National Geographic, Discovery, Elsevier, Cambridge, Oxford, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Reuters ... This all sounds very, very good! But the project is not without its problems. As reported by Pesha Magid for Mada Masr upon the announcement of the project, some academics are not convinced that all Egyptians will actually be able to make use of the resource, citing accessibility issues and language barriers ..."