Latest Kahle Stories

The number of book titles accessible to people who are blind or dyslexic is small, even though audio versions of best-sellers fill store shelves and new technology fuels the popularity of digitized books. The nonprofit organization Internet Archive in San Francisco is attempting a new service that will change that.  The group has hired hundreds of people to scan thousands of books into its digital database, which will more than double the available titles for people who are not able to...

U.S. Internet search engine giant Google should not be allowed nearly exclusive rights to out-of-print books for its online publishing venture, critics say. Academics and public interest groups alike are threatening to file legal briefs to block a lawsuit settlement that may give Google the rights to millions of out-of-print texts whose publishing rights are owned by unknown or missing sources, The New York Times reported Saturday. Harvard University Library head Robert Darnton said if...

Courtney Mitchel, of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department is among hundreds of librarians who spend hours of each day going through almost 600 pages of some of the world's oldest books.Their work is part of Google's Book Search, a project that plans to offer its users access to digital versions of 50 million to 100 million ancient texts."It's monotonous," 24-year-old Mitchel said."But it's still something that I'm learning about - how to interact with really...