Penny Hero (dot) Net

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.