Brewster Kahle has many titles. These days he’s best known as founder of the Internet Archive (home of The Wayback Machine) and founding member of the Open Content Alliance.

From the Article:

“We have to have universal access to everything, just like a library,” he says. “Do we want that under a single corporation’s control? It is openness, not corporate control, that propels capitalism.”

[Snip]

Digital libraries will shape education, creativity and our shared intellectual heritage, Kahle declares. As founder and director of the Internet Archive, Kahle has posted online digital copies of 1.7 million books, 100,000 hours of television, 200,000 video clips, 70,000 concerts and 415,000 audio recordings. All that material can be downloaded for free from the Archive’s Web site.

[Snip]

Bookserver* uses a range of open source and proprietary electronic book standards, search algorithms, editing tools and libraries. The architecture, as Kahle calls it, potentially separates manufacturers of devices from control over much of the content inside them. It also preserves the idea of the lending library–if you “check out” a volume, others cannot access it in the time allowed to you. Publishers sell their books in the system using credit cards.

The article continues with more about Google Book Search and Kahle’s background.

We were surprised not to see The Wayback Machine mentioned in the stats about the Internet Archive listed above. At the moment (and we know of nothing coming), “Wayback” is probably the best chance a researcher has to access a page no longer on the Internet. Material in “Wayback” dates back to 1996 and as of today, contains more than 150 BILLION archived pages. The Internet Archive also offers a fee-based service that helps organizations organize and archive their web content. It’s called, Archive-It.

* See Also: We Have an In-Depth Post About Bookserver on ResourceShelf
It Includes an comprehensive press review the day after the Bookserver announcement.