I’ve always been a bit disappointed in how inert the Library of Congress has been when it comes to books in the digital age. Had they had a bit of foresight in the late 1990s, they might have scanned and digitized their vast collection of public domain books published in this country; Google beat them to the punch, and now we have to use a private company’s services to get to what should be our own public domain. Maybe this realization has dawned on someone at the Library of Congress; at any rate, they’ve been unveiling some interesting new content at the website of The Center for the Book, read.gov.
What’s new? They’re using the Internet Archive’s page-turning system for the handful of classic books they’ve put online. They haven’t put up very many so far, and it’s unclear how many they intend to put up, but the system they have in place is elegant and readable – much more so than looking at the same books in Google Books, for example. The books presently available for online reading from their rare book collection include, for example, a 1909 edition of The Arabian Nights and My First Little German Book, a rather nice instructional children’s book from the late nineteenth century.
Another initiative is their ongoing exquisite corpse for children. The exquisite corpse was originally a Surrealist parlor game; now it’s a novel for young people, being written by 18 different authors (including Daniel Handler, Jon Scieszka, and Susan Cooper), with chapter-opening illustrations by four different illustrators. They’re only a few weeks into a year-long project, but the results are promising.
