Open Content Archive: Books Available

Since the announcement of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) back in Oct. 2005, I have been waiting to see the results of the project and view some of the scanned books. While the major search engine partners like Yahoo! and Microsoft have not yet launched any product, I noticed that the Internet Archive does have quite a few books already available in their Text Archive (over 30,000). Look at a record to see the rich meta data included (not just title, author, date, and publisher, but also language, contributor,call number , scan date, and image count). The book is available in PDF, txt, DjVu, ftp, and Flip Book formats. The Flip Book is a nice interface showcased at OpenLibrary which mimics the flipping of pages in printed books. So look for OCA books at the Internet Archive's Text Archive. It will be interesting to see if all of these books are available at all the partners sites, not to mention comparing coverage to Google Books and Amazon.