Kelty, Christopher M.

Ztracená virtuální knihovna

The Disappearing Virtual Library

Autor: Christopher M. Kelty

By the end of February, without much fanfare, a website called ‘library.nu’ disappeared. A Munich judge issued an injunction at the request of a coalition of international scholarly publishers who accused the site of piracy. Library.nu (alternately known as gigapedia.com, gigapedia.info and gigle.ws) offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. And not just any texts--not Harlequin romances, or John Grisham novels or the latest "Downloading for Dummies" handbook--but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. It was a simply stunning array of high-quality scholarship. The texts ranged from so-called 'orphan works' (out of print, but still in copyright) to recent issues, from poorly scanned to expertly ripped, from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It represented a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: sex guidebooks and scholarly books about pornography. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilization.