Scribes of the Digital Era

A library-scanning project brings public-domain materials online and offers an alternative to Google's model

Brewster Kahle is mobilizing an army of Internet-era scribes who are fastidiously copying books page by page. Unlike the monks who slowly copied ancient tomes by hand, though, these scribes make digital reproductions, and they zip through hundreds of pages each hour.

Mr. Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is guiding a mass-digitization project called the

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