From the Escapist comes a report about Brewster Kahle’s Herculean effort to collect every book every published, in original dead-tree form:

“Kahle, a computer scientist with a degree from MIT, is most famous as the creator of the Internet Archive, a non-profit group formed in 1996 with a goal of preserving every web page ever created.

In that same archival spirit, Kahle has recently set his sights on preserving the existing written history of mankind, and he’s off to a pretty solid start.

To date, Kahle’s warehouse in Richmond, California houses 500,000 books. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 130 million tomes collected by Google in its efforts to digitize the entirety of our literature, but Kahle is heartened by the speed at which his group has been able to accrue their half-million books.

The existence of Google’s aforementioned project also causes one to question Kahle’s motivations. After all, if we’ve got the text available online, why keep their archaic dead tree iterations?

‘There is always going to be a role for books,’ Kahle says. ‘We want to see books live forever.'”

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Kahle discusses his work in digital archiving at TED: