Technology and Books for All

by Marie Lebert

1993: ONLINE BOOKS PAGE

[Overview]

Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University, The Online Books Page is "a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all." (excerpt from the website) John Ockerbloom first maintained this page on the website of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1999, he moved it to its present location at the University of Pennsylvania Library, where he is a digital library planner and researcher. The Online Books Page listed 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000 books in 2003 (including 4,000 books published by women), 25,000 books in 2006 and 30,000 books in 2007. The books "have been authored, placed online, and hosted by a wide variety of individuals and groups throughout the world", with 7,000 books from Project Gutenberg. The FAQ also lists copyright information about most countries in the world with links to further reading.

[In Depth (published in 1999)]

John Mark Ockerbloom first started the website of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU CS), and began maintaining The Online Books Page on it. Web space and computing resources were provided by the School of Computer Science.

Interviewed by email in September 1998, John wrote: "I was the original webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local web in 1993. The local web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The Online Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.)

After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the net. So that's how my index got started.

I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The Online Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the net had for making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many books going online that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my online books works in some form or another.

I am very excited about the potential of the internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, in making books available to a wide audience for free via the net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer."

In 1998, The Online Books Page listed more than 7,000 books, which could be browsed by author, by title or by subject. It also listed significant directories and archives of online texts, and special exhibits. From the main search page, users could search four types of media: books, music, art, and video.

The Online Books Page began listing serials. As stated on the website: "Along with books, The Online Books Page is also now listing major archives of serials (such as magazines, published journals, and newspapers), as of June 1998. Serials can be at least as important as books in library research. Serials are often the first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are sources for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary, They are also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature appears. (For those who might still quibble about serials being listed on a 'books page', back issues of serials are often bound and reissued as hardbound 'books'.)"

The Online Books Page participated in the Experimental Search System of the Library of Congress. It also worked with The Universal Library Project, hosted at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 1999, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Ph.D. in computer science, John moved to work as a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Library. He also moved The Online Books Page there, and went on expanding it.