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April 2012

Ark full of books to help tide over digital disaster

By Tarunkumar Singhal, Raman Jokhakar, Chartered Accountants
Reading Time 1 mins
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Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age.

As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon. com in 1999, Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too. “We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future. If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough,” he said.

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