OpenLibrary

OpenLibrary was a topic that I was very interested in looking into after exploring the Aaron Schwartz connection. If a mind as great as Schwartz’s was working on it, I wondered how advanced it was and what it could offer to me. Therefore, I created an account and started looking through what OpenLibrary had to offer. After all, the basic idea of this website is very interesting, and could be a very powerful resource if it took off.

Once creating an account, the first thing that I noticed was the statistics on the bottom of the page. They said that in the last 28 days, there had been over 6.7 million unique visitors, 17,757 new members, and over 100,000 ebooks borrowed. Right off the bat, this impressed me. I did not expect this to be a very popular website, as I had never heard of it. However, these numbers seemed to point to the contrary. I began to wonder how big this site could be and the extent of what it could offer with all these unique and new users in the past month.

However, I was a bit underwhelmed after making an account. The first search I made was for “Harry Potter.” I wondered if OpenLibrary would have any of the uber popular Harry Potter books for someone to borrow and read. But, this was not the case. Seeing this, I decided to navigate back to the home page and see what I could actually check out.

While clicking on an assortment of different titles on the home page, I noticed a few interesting things. First, you were able to borrow physical copies of some of the books (not electronic ones). This caught me by surprise as I assumed every book would be an eBook here. However, the software was able to locate many locations, ZSR being one of them, where I could check out the book that I had clicked on.

Another interesting thing I noticed were books that were DAISY files. These were files that can only be opened with specialized devices with a library of congress key. This made me wonder what was in these files, and why they were included in OpenLibrary if everyone cannot just open and read them themselves.

Finally, after a bit of searching, I was able to find a book available as an eBook that I could read. I really liked the format of this, as the book looked as though it was laid out infront of me, and I could “flip pages” with the click of a mouse. I feel like this gives reading online a much more authentic feeling. A feeling that I much prefer to reading a never ending wall of text, or even seeing a bar fill up to show me how far through the book I am as the new pages appear.

Overall, when I was able to find a book that was available that I wanted to read, I found it to be a nice experience, formatting and all things considered. Additionally, I liked the option to find hard copies of these books near by. However, at the end of the day I don’t think I would suggest OpenLibrary, not yet at least. This is because at this stage, there simply isn’t enough popular material on it to be of much use to the average consumer. Although, I am very interested to see what direction OpenLibrary goes, and if they are able to keep bringing in new users, and what that will mean.