Internet Archive Launches BookServer Project

The Internet Archive has launched the BookServer project: an open system for finding, buying, and borrowing digital books over the Internet.

At our launch event on Monday, the Internet Archive demonstrated how the BookServer ecosystem could be used to deliver books several e-book readers, including the OLPC laptop, the Amazon Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Reader, and the Humanware VictorReader Stream, a talking eReader for the blind and print-disabled.

The Internet Archive also announced it was making all 1.6 million public domain books on archive.org available in EPUB and Daisy talking book formats, to better support e-book devices.

To help develop BookServer, the Internet Archive partnered with OLPC, Aldiko, ThreePress, Pixel Qi, Inkmesh, FLOSS Manuals, University of Toronto Libraries, LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Shortcovers, Feedbooks, O’Reilly Media,  Adobe, Bluefire Productions, Humanware, Ingram, Lexcycle, author Katie Hafner, and many others.

We were pleased that so many partners could join us on Monday for the BookServer launch party. For those who couldn’t attend, the Follow the Reader blog has an excellent article detailing the BookServer launch.

Resource Shelf has an extensive overview of BookServer media coverage. Thanks to everyone who helped develop and launch the BookServer ecosystem! If you are an author, publisher, book seller, device maker, library, or a reader, please help us in building an open ecosystem for online books!