Übergeek Aaron Schwartz started another project, it is called The Open Library. My first reaction: I don't like that word "open" in there. It has connotations like "free" and "open source" or "GPL." Luckily it turns out not to be that bad. It does not appear to be a free as in freedom kind of thing. For a moment I thought they were going to rebuild the whole world's library under the GNU FDL, but thank God, no, they aren't.
As I understand it they are building a structured wiki, in which you can post metadata and excerpts of books and with that building the world's biggest library -- that's the idea.
So what does that remind you of? Yes, Wikipedia. The Wikipedia of books. Bookapedia. And what does that translate to? Crappy, often misleading or simply wrong information. We've seen this all before people, it's a frickin' wiki. Everybody can edit, everybody can screw it up. Here you go, currently I am the second author of "Tom Sawyer":
Yet more wasted time on another pointless exercise in freeing up information in a world full of molesters. Will these geeks ever learn?
Monday, July 16, 2007
Open Library, Bound to Fail
