I've been a long time fan of the Internet Archive and their many amazing projects. Their founder Brewster Kahle recruited me for the EFF, where I eventually held the Director position for five years before moving to Hong Kong two years ago.

Brewster has a long standing project to scan books and make them publicly available. He's working with libraries around the world to do this. However, he has a list of 300,000 books he wants, but can't get from any library they work with.

Incredibly, 61,000 of those books are in moocher's hands, has having been passed among members in our decade of operation. And another 563 books are available right now.

Brewster has created an Internet Archive BookMooch Charity Account and I've started him off with 50 points from the "public libraries charity" pool that you guys have been giving too.

Here are two ways you can help:

1. if you have some points to spare, give them a few so they can keep mooching & scanning.
   
2. Download the spreadsheet of books they want, and see if you have any on your bookshelf. CSV FILES: ISBN list or complete spreadsheet.

I'll also help Brewster import the 300,000 books into his wishlist, so that as they appear for mooching, he can get ahold of them

I have heard about the giving nature of this community-- that is something special and worth cherishing.

The Internet Archive has about 500,000 modern books digitized and available via https://openlibrary.org to borrow for free.

We have a new, big idea, and we might even get $100million from MacArthur Foundation to make it come true

http://library2020.blog.archive.org

4 million books to bring every library into being a digital library by offering each library a digital version of the physical books in their collections. Then they can choose to lend these ebooks to their patrons (with the same restrictions as physical books, but it is much better than nothing).

We can use your help. We need books we don't have so we can digitize them, and we need to let the macarthur board know this is a project worth supporting.

if you have ideas, please let us know at info@archive.org
twitter @internetarchive and
facebook (but, uh, I dont know our account because, uh, I dont use facebook).

We don't have a good way to ask what books we don't have yet, but we are working on it.

The list that John posted is the list of books listed on some course syllabi posted on the Internet (from the opensyllabus project) that we don't have already. All told we are missing millions of great books.

If the books get to Richmond CA, we will digitize the ones we have not already, and then preserve the physical book (we do not destroy them). We try to find good homes for duplicates.

Thank you, all!

-brewster
Founder, Digital Librarian

You could always post the duplicates and any other books you don't need back on Bookmooch!

~Aramada

We are happy book people!

Blog post on this.

Guys -- I agree with you that "real" books are great, and I'm not fan of DRMed ebooks. But what the Archive is doing is scanning books that are on the verge of extinction : they're books not available from all the libraries he works with. BookMoochers have some of the last copies available.

Each book whose contents are kept from disappearing is an author's life, gifts and contributions that was kept from being erased by time.

The "real books" swapping that we do here on BM can and should exist hand in hand with a fair-use, library-oriented, digital approach like the Archive is pursuing.

Given the list, I might possibly find a bunch of books you are looking for...
Could it be suitable for you guys to receive something in classical languages (ancient Greek or Latin) with an Italian parallel text translation?

Best of luck on your projects!
@mllelou