'The Wizard of Oz' Meets the Web: LizardTech Teams with The Internet Archive to Bring Digital Books to Impoverished World Communities.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 8, 2004 Three times a week an unassuming vehicle pulls up to a school in rural Uganda, sets up a few tables and chairs, and starts printing books. This is the Uganda Digital Bookmobile, a project inspired by the work of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive See Wayback Machine and Web archiving. and implemented by a spin-off The situation that arises when a parent corporation organizes a subsidiary corporation, to which it transfers a portion of its assets in exchange for all of the subsidiary's capital stock, which is subsequently transferred to the parent corporation's shareholders. nonprofit, Anywhere Books. The Uganda bookmobile, and others like it in Egypt, India and the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. , uses common office computers, printers and paper cutters to create books from public domain e-books hosted on the Internet Archive. For the Ugandan communities visited by the bookmobile, that means the creation of new school libraries for dozens of schools, free books for families' homes, and extra resources for community centers. The books come from the Internet Archive's online repository of 20,000 books -- most of which come from the Million Book Project, a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University, at Pittsburgh, Pa.; est. 1967 through the merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (founded 1900, opened 1905) and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (founded 1913). , the Internet Archive, and the governments of India and China. The Million Book Project expects to have 100,000 books digitized and online by the end of 2004. But surely a book consisting of scans of every page must represent a massive computer file -- too big even for broadband users to download? After scanning, the files are encoded with LizardTech's DJVu(R) technology, which amazingly compresses hundreds of megabytes down to files ranging from one to 15 megabytes -- small enough even for dialup users to download. "The Million Book Project and the Internet Bookmobile represents the World Wide Web working at its highest potential, and all of us at LizardTech are proud to be a part of this very worthwhile effort," said Carlos Domingo, LizardTech president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. . "Books are something we take for granted, but they are a rare commodity in parts of the world that are struggling with poverty and disease. The value of this project to future generations cannot be overstated o·ver·state tr.v. o·ver·stat·ed, o·ver·stat·ing, o·ver·states To state in exaggerated terms. See Synonyms at exaggerate. o ." Internet Archive selected leading-edge DjVu(R) technology to power its digital books initiatives, taking advantage of the software's unique support for scanned documents resulting in dramatically smaller file sizes which can be quickly distributed over any network, including narrowband and wireless networks. Using a free DjVu browser plug-in A third-party software product, such as a search toolbar, that is integrated into a Web browser to extend its capabilities. A "helper application" provides similar capabilities to a browser plug-in, but runs as an external application and typically launches another window for viewing. , users can simply click on a title. From there, it's a few easy steps to download and print the entire contents of the book -- in minutes. Both text and accompanying black-and-white or full-color images download almost instantaneously, with virtually no loss of image quality. DocumentExpress with DjVu software has won rave reviews for its superb image quality, easy access and lightning-fast distribution. DjVu image documents are the smallest in the industry, up to 1,000 times smaller than TIFF files, and anywhere from 10 to 100 times smaller than JPEGs or PDFs. The free DjVu viewing plug-in is available at www.lizardtech.com/download. Internet Bookmobiles are also traveling across the United States visiting schools, libraries, retirement centers, museums, and other public places. The San Francisco-based Internet Archive said its goal is to put one million books on the Web in celebration of public domain access. For more information about Internet Archive, visit www.archive.org. For more information on the Uganda Digital Bookmobile, visit www.anywherebooks.org About LizardTech, a Celartem Company LizardTech was founded in 1992 to build valuable business solutions from technologies created by the world's leading research organizations including Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National (LANL LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA. ) and AT&T Labs. LizardTech is a leader in applying state-of-the-art technologies to the real-world challenges of managing, distributing, and accessing large complex digital content such as aerial photographs, satellite imagery Satellite imagery consists of photographs of Earth or other planets made from artificial satellites. History The first satellite photographs of Earth were made August 14, 1959 by the US satellite Explorer 6. , and color scanned documents. LizardTech's software is installed on millions of desktops and integrated into a wide variety of platforms and applications. LizardTech has offices in Seattle, London and Tokyo, and is part of Celartem Technology Inc. (Osaka Securities Exchange Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE) Established after World War II, one of the three major securities markets in Japan. , Hercules:4330), a Japan-based technology company focused on storage and distribution technologies for digital images. For more information about LizardTech and GeoExpress software, visit www.lizardtech.com. About Internet Archive The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit that was founded to build an 'Internet library,' with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden , the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on the web traffic to other websites. and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to build more well-rounded collections. For More Information About Anywhere Books, visit http://www.anywherebooks.org/ |
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