The latest book digitization effort is The Open-Access Text Archive (OATA) run by the Internet Archive. OATA integrates with Project Gutenberg so, for those who are used to going to Gutenberg.org for their plain text or Plucker e-content, you can go to OATA instead.
The OATA has a number of advantages over the existing digital book archives we've visited. For one, it has a box marked "batting average" that ranks items by the percentage of people who downloaded them after visiting details pages. This is a refreshing complement to a mere popularity box, which OATA also has. OATA says that keeping a batting average "avoids the 'rich-get-richer' behavior of ranking by the number of downloads."
So far, the most downloaded items from OATA have been, in order, The New Hacker's Dictionary, Ethics of Sex Acts, and Pictures of ARPANET. The items with the highest batting averages are all advanced science texts....
PS: The article brings welcome new exposure to OATA, but OATA is not "the latest book digitization effort". It was launched in December 2004.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/21/2006 12:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
