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Competition Increases for Google Book Search
The Internet Archive’s efforts to digitize materials and make them available online for free got a big boost this week: the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is awarding it a grant (some news articles report it to be $1 million) to continue its work. Combine this news with the Internet Archive’s recent milestone of digitizing 100,000 books (now publicly available at www.archive.org) and this may mean increasing competition for Google Book Search. While Google stores the digitized materials in its own proprietary index, the Internet Archive offers an alternative to libraries by offering materials in an open format accessible to everyone.
That’s great news for access to material. I’m not sure it treads on Google Books, because the Internet Archive doesn’t have a search engine on top of it. You need to know which book you’re looking for. The Archive won’t respond to general queries.