PCWorld.com - Online Library in the Cards

Yahoo is working on an online library of digitized public domain texts and films. The first content is expected to be ready by the end of the year.

Yahoo is one of a number of organizations supporting the Open Content Alliance, which plans to set up an online archive of existing digital collections of books and films, as well as to add new works to the archive...

Adobe Systems and Hewlett-Packard will supply software. Books will be provided by the University of Toronto and O'Reilly Media, and films by the Prelinger Archives and the United Kingdom's National Archives. Yahoo will index that content and fund the digitization of a collection of American literature selected by the University of California, according to an announcement posted to Yahoo's official blog on Sunday by Brewster Kahle.

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Some of the works will be released under one or other of the Creative Commons licenses, which allow artistic works to be distributed or reused under certain conditions. In this way, third parties could transform some of the classic books in the digital library into audio books, or reprint them and offer them for sale, without additional permission, Kahle wrote.

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