Yahoo, the University of California and the Internet Archive are working on a project to digitize books, and make them available everywhere in the world through the Internet.

The only difference between Yahoo’s project and it’s rival’s, is that Google is maintaining control over the searching of all the digitized books by restricting public access to copyright protected books. Yahoo will scan and digitize only books in the public domain and will make them available through any Web search engine and downloadable for free.

The material will be hosted by The Internet Archive, Hewlett-Packard Labs will provide the technology to scan the books, and Adobe Systems will licence it’s Acrobat Reader and it’s Photoshop.
The content to be digitized will be provided bt The University of California, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger Archives.

Open Content Alliance (recently formed) will manage this project.
By exposing more people to scholarly works, the OCA project could contribute to improved research and help reverse the trend among publishers of cutting back the number and print runs of books, said Lawrence Pitts, chairman of the University of California Academic Counsel Special Committee on Scholarly Communication.

“This is an international effort, not just domestic,” said Dave Mandelbrot, Yahoo’s vice president of search content.

The OCA effort was applauded by publisher and author groups who have been critical of Google’s effort, including the Association of Learned and professional Society Publishers, the Text and Academic Authors Association, or TAAA, and the Authors Guild (which sued Google for it’s project, Google Print).

Nate Tyler, Google spokesman said related to this event: “We welcome efforts to make information accessible to the world.”