A Million Books in DjVu
An announcement by PlanetDjVu, December 20, 2002
The Internet Archive is hosting an ambitious project to place 1 million out-of-copyright books on the web by the year 2005, for free public access. Already, more than 1 thousand books are available for viewing, for download and printing. The undertaking will create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library.
Click here to visit the Million Book Project at www.archive.org.
DjVu is one of the multiple file formats that are available for each book. The other formats include Rich Text, Raw Text, TIFF and PDF. TIFF, PDF and DjVu are the three formats that preserve the original page layout of the book, and DjVu is by far the smallest and most efficient format for retrieval.
Most of the books currently posted were created with bitonal scans, but there are a few books that have been scanned and converted to DjVu in full color, notably The Wizard of Oz. It will be worth your time to visit the book page, and click the DjVu link to open this book in DjVu format.
The Internet Archive reports that:
"Our goal in digitizing these texts and putting them online is to provide easy
access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival texts.
By providing near-unrestricted access to these texts, we hope to encourage
widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not
have used them before."
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