British Library Makes Available 250,000 Digitized Books
From the post:
The British Library is making available 250,000 texts through Google’s Books system.
As a legal deposit library,The British Library gets copies of all books produced in the U.K. and Ireland, as well as overseas books published in Britain.
The texts, some published in the 18th century, are in the public domain. Included in the collection will be books on mathematics, science, and engineering, which would serve as invaluable resources for historians of science and today’s scientists and researchers. It’s plausible that there is plenty of original thinking that’s been overlooked and forgotten–and which will soon be only a Google search away.
This comes on top of the British Library’s effort at bringing 60,000 digital copies of historic books to the general public as a free iPad app. At 150 million texts, the size of Library’s collection is second only to that of the Library of Congress.
See also the IPad, 60,000 Text Story.
The amount of available semantically diverse data grows everyday.