My Experience With Open Library
Open Library wants to create “ one web page for every book ever published”.
Open Library is an online database that aims to bring together the world’s cultural legacy through books that can be freely accessed by anyone. According to its homepage, it “is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published,” and is similar to Wikipedia in that anyone can contribute to the information it contains. I had heard about this website a long time ago and somewhat knew about its purpose, but had never actually used it until today. Learning about Aaron Swartz’s involvement with Open Library significantly increased my interest in it because during the past few months I’ve seen that Swartz was involved in some very influential projects around the internet.
The website’s homepage gave me a positive impression of it because I saw right away that Open Library’s main purpose is to allow users to read and borrow books for free. Additionally, the homepage contained impressive statistics describing the high levels of activity that it had experienced during the four weeks leading up to my visit, which showed that it has a thriving user base. However, I did notice while browsing that there were inconsistencies in statistics on different pages describing the size of Open Library’s collection. For the amount of eBooks available to read, I saw pages that stated “over 1,000,000”, “over 2 million” and “over 3,000,000”. Similarly, for eBooks available to borrow I saw pages that stated “over 250,000” and “over 200,000”. The different numbers on different pages made it difficult to determine the true quantity of titles contained in this database.
Open Library’s search function is similar to those in library websites that I have used before. It allows searching by categories such as title, author, and ISBN. Additionally, search results can be filtered for some of these same criteria, as well as others such as language and book format. Once I searched for a book, I could click on one of the listed editions of it and see whether it was available for reading or borrowing, and what the options were for purchasing it. I liked that the website connected with the WorldCat database and show me physical locations where I could go to borrow a copy of a book.
The books that are available for reading tend to be ones that are in the public domain, so they are not very recent. They include fiction and nonfiction on many different subjects, and many of them are in languages other than English. The options for reading them include reading them online and downloading them in common formats such as PDF, ePub and plain text, as well as other formats that are specific to certain devices.
The books available for borrowing are generally newer than those available for reading, but the collection contains mainly 20th century titles, which still aren’t extremely recent. The way that borrowing works through the website is that up to 5 titles can be borrowed at a time, for 2 weeks each. They can be read in the browser, or in the PDF or ePub formats. These books are provided through 1,000 participating libraries, as well as a few other open lending programs.
Creating an account on the website allowed me to borrow a book, and I was pleased by the online reading experience. I was able to view the book in a single-page, double-page, or thumbnail view, as well as zoom in or out. I think these options are helpful because they can accommodate the preferences of different users. The images of pages were very clear, and I appreciated the page-turning effect because it made reading the book seem more realistic. The feature that impressed me the most about the reading experience was that the full text of the book was incorporated in a way that it could be searched and there was also an audio function that could read it for me. Near this was a “play” button that automatically flipped through the pages of the book, but I don’t think that this would be useful for actually reading the book. The pages turned at a speed that was too quick for reading, and I didn’t see any way to change the speed. I think this function was meant more for just quickly flipping through the pages of documents.
I believe that the strongest feature of Open Library is the borrowing of eBooks, because the website can arrange and manage borrowing from different sources. For the freely readable eBooks, I don’t think that they’d be too difficult to find through other sources. I like Open Library’s mission of creating a web page with information for every book ever published, and it did seem to have pages for all of the titles that I could think of searching. However, many pages had incomplete information, and I believe that Open Library has a long way to go before it becomes as thorough as something like Wikipedia. This was an interesting project to investigate, and it definitely has functions that would be useful to certain people, but I don’t see myself using it much in the future because of its lack of very current or major titles.
