Digital librarianship—the digitization, collection, and cataloguing of texts—was one of the earliest uses of networked computers. By most accounts, the first digital library was Project Gutenberg, which began making public domain works available in 1971 via the Arpanet, the ...
  • SK@utsukta.org
    9·
    1 day ago

    Here’s what I see as a consequence of free educational book distribution: within decades, generations of people everywhere in the world will grow up with access to the best scientific texts of all time. […] [T]he quality and accessibility of education to the poor will grow dramatically too. Frankly, I see this as the only way to naturally improve mankind: we need to make all the information available to them at any time.—Anonymous administrator of the Russian shadow library site Library Genesis (LG), explaining its raison d’être

    Free flow of knowledge is absolutely essential. Of all the things that should be accessible knowledge and the opportunity for every person to realize their full potential should be a must.

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Free flow of knowledge is absolutely essential. Of all the things that should be accessible knowledge and the opportunity for every person to realize their full potential should be a must.

      I totally agree. I often think about self-taught scientists like Michael Faraday or Mary Anning and what they’d say about how hard it is to access knowledge today, even with all the tech we have. Back in the 1800s, they had to hunt down books, write letters to experts, and dig through whatever scraps of info they could find. Now we’ve got the internet, but somehow it’s still locked behind paywalls and profiteers trying to gatekeep learning.