Librarians' Group: Educause Review: Transforming Our Libraries from Analog to Digital: A 2020 Vision

"We all want to see the modern-day Library of Alexandria, a digital library where the published works of humankind — all the books, music, video, webpages, and software — are available to anyone curious enough to want to access them. I believe now is the time to build it.

The technology and costs to achieve this vision are now understood, and in fact, various projects are proving that it can be done. Three major entities have digitized modern materials at scale: Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive, probably in that order of magnitude. Google’s goal was to digitize texts to aid user search and its own artificial intelligence projects. Amazon’s book-digitization program helps customers browse books before purchasing them; Amazon is quiet about the number of books it has scanned and any future plans for them. The Internet Archive has digitized more than 2.5 million public domain (pre-1923) books and made them fully downloadable and 500,000+ modern (post-1923) books and made them available to the blind and dyslexic and through its lending system on its Open Library site. Yet bringing universal access to all books has not been achieved. Why? There are the commonly understood challenges: money, technology, and legal clarity. Our community has been fractured by disagreement about the path forward, with ongoing resistance to some approaches that strike many as monopolistic. Indeed, the library community seems to be holding out for a healthy system that engages authors, publishers, libraries, and most importantly, the readers and future readers. I suggest that by working together, we can efficiently achieve our goal. This will require the library community working with philanthropists, booksellers, and publishers to unleash the full value of our existing and future collections by offering them digitally."