Three times a week an unassuming vehicle pulls up to a school in rural Uganda, sets up a few tables and chairs, and starts printing books. This is the Uganda Digital Bookmobile, a project inspired by the work of the Internet Archive and implemented by a spin-off nonprofit, Anywhere Books.
The Uganda bookmobile, and others like it in Egypt, India and the United States, uses common office computers, printers and paper cutters to create books from public domain e-books hosted on the Internet Archive. For the Ugandan communities visited by the bookmobile, that means the creation of new school libraries for dozens of schools, free books for families’ homes, and extra resources for community centers.
The books come from the Internet Archive’s online repository of 20,000 books — most of which come from the Million Book Project, a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University, the Internet Archive, and the governments of India and China. The Million Book Project expects to have 100,000 books digitized and online by the end of 2004.
But surely a book consisting of scans of every page must represent a massive computer file — too big even for broadband users to download. After scanning, the files are encoded with Seattle-based LizardTech’s DJVu(R) technology, which amazingly compresses hundreds of megabytes down to files ranging from one to 15 megabytes — small enough even for dialup users to download.
“The Million Book Project and the Internet Bookmobile represents the World Wide Web working at its highest potential, and all of us at LizardTech are proud to be a part of this very worthwhile effort,” said Carlos Domingo, LizardTech president and CEO. “Books are something we take for granted, but they are a rare commodity in parts of the world that are struggling with poverty and disease. The value of this project to future generations cannot be overstated.”
Internet Archive selected leading-edge DjVu(R) technology to power its digital books initiatives, taking advantage of the software’s unique support for scanned documents resulting in dramatically smaller file sizes which can be quickly distributed over any network, including narrowband and wireless networks.
Using a free DjVu browser plug-in, users can simply click on a title. From there, it’s a few easy steps to download and print the entire contents of the book — in minutes. Both text and accompanying black-and-white or full-color images download almost instantaneously, with virtually no loss of image quality.
DocumentExpress with DjVu software has won rave reviews for its superb image quality, easy access and lightning-fast distribution. DjVu image documents are the smallest in the industry, up to 1,000 times smaller than TIFF files, and anywhere from 10 to 100 times smaller than JPEGs or PDFs. The free DjVu viewing plug-in is available atwww.lizardtech.com/download.
Internet Bookmobiles are also traveling across the United States visiting schools, libraries, retirement centers, museums, and other public places. The San Francisco-based Internet Archive said its goal is to put one million books on the Web in celebration of public domain access.
About LizardTech
LizardTech was founded in 1992 to build valuable business solutions from technologies created by the world’s leading research organizations including Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and AT&T Labs. LizardTech is a leader in applying state-of-the-art technologies to the real-world challenges of managing, distributing, and accessing large complex digital content such as aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and color scanned documents. LizardTech’s software is installed on millions of desktops and integrated into a wide variety of platforms and applications. LizardTech has offices in Seattle, London and Tokyo, and is part of Celartem Technology Inc. (Osaka Securities Exchange, Hercules:4330), a Japan-based technology company focused on storage and distribution technologies for digital images. For more information about LizardTech and GeoExpress software, visit www.lizardtech.com.
