July 18, 2011 11:08 pm
Business diary: Brewster Kahle
As told to Zoë Corbyn
The 50-year-old entrepreneur is the founder of the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation that is working to digitise the world’s books. In the 1990s, Mr Kahle founded two companies, WAIS and Alexa Internet, which he later sold to AOL and Amazon respectively. He is based in San Francisco.
● Last week we added another 2m gigabytes of data storage capacity. It cost $200,000 to buy the servers but it was worth it to protect our ever-growing collection of digital material. We are digitising 1,000 books a day as well as collecting music, movies and internet sites.
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Data storage is a challenge for many organisations and there is a big move to use the cloud. The idea of trusting things in the cloud frightens me. We are not against the cloud per se, it is just that you should always maintain a copy of what is important to you.
● I was in Berlin this month for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s annual conference to discuss how to open up access to content and data. I gave a talk about how technology is allowing us to collect all the published works of humankind and make them accessible to everyone via the internet.
It is absolutely critical that the digital sphere is open and the best thing commercial and non-commercial entities can do is understand that openness is a friend. Being open in the internet world makes you more useful to consumers and potential customers and that makes good business sense.
● Before that trip I was at the American Library Association’s annual conference in New Orleans. It was fun walking down Bourbon Street with librarians everywhere. You could pick us out.
We announced the latest figures from our e-book lending programme, where we work with libraries to lend recent e-books that we buy or digitise. Since we started in February, 1,000 libraries from six countries have signed up and we have a pool of 100,000 modern e-books available. Some ask if we even need libraries any more. Of course. People have always both bought and borrowed books. Libraries and bookstores answer things in different ways. And libraries are evolving just as much as bookstores.
● E-books were one of the big topics of discussion. Their moment has arrived. For the publishing industry, it is the equivalent of how the MP3 changed the music business. And e-book publishers seem to be making some of the same mistakes that the music publishers did before they started selling their products. They are doing complicated licensing deals and working through a few central distribution points – Google, Apple, Amazon – and this is not good for an industry.
Businesses should want to control the relationship with their customers. We want to widen it so there is a broad market in which many publishers sell books to lots of different people in lots of different ways. There is now a library consortium committing millions of dollars to buying e-books. So if publishers are willing to sell to us we will buy them up a storm.
● Most of our funding comes from libraries. We have book-scanning arrangements with them and we provide them with technology to crawl websites for their own archiving, creating a revenue stream. We also get donations and I put in some of my own money.
I love running a non-profit organisation. It is like running a normal business but without the secrets and instead being able to give away everything we do. It does require different skills. I am focused on the mission, not on money.
We are seeing the development of quite a few tech non-profits – us, the Linux Foundation, Mozilla, Public Library of Science, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wikipedia. Some of the most interesting internet developments are coming from this sector. These non-profits are thriving because they are well adapted to a sharing-orientated environment.
● We have a great group to work with and this is a fun project. If you are here for three years we honour you with a little statue inspired by the Terracotta Army in China. We are all on display in pews at the archive – our building was previously a church.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011
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