This article from The Daily Mail certainly caught my attention. Is Brewster Kahle crazy or the smartest man in the world?
By DAMIEN GAYLE
UPDATED: 15:06 EST, 7 March 201
An internet tycoon turned latter-day Noah is trying to collect a physical copy of every single book in existence in case of a cataclysmic internet failure.
Brewster Kahle has spent $3million building a book repository in San Francisco, California, where he hopes to archive as many books as possible.
So far he has managed to accumulate about 500,000 volumes – ranging from American Indian Policy in the 20th Century to Temptation’s Kiss – but one day he hopes to have 10million.
Storage: Internet tycoon Brewster Kahle has spent $3million building this repository in San Francisco where he hopes to archive as many books as possible
Mr Kahle is worried that as volumes are increasingly digitised their paper versions are being thrown out, raising the prospect that one day the originals will be unavailable.
And if the digital copies are somehow corrupted, the knowledge those books hold could be lost forever.
Mr Kahle told the New York Times last week that he considers it important to keep in touch with our past even as we move into the digital 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,’ he said.
‘One copy in one institution is not good enough.’
To read the complete article, go to the link below. It is well worth the time.
Every Woman Dreams... 