About Us

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

Vision

The ultimate goal of the Open Library is to make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world. While large in scope and ambition, this goal is within our grasp. Achieving it will require the participation of librarians, authors, government officials and technologists.

Imagine what a comprehensive, open library could be! A talented math whiz who lives in a rural community can explore the works of high math. An elderly person can have a large print edition of any book ever published. An innovative young scholar can publish a book directly to this great library on subjects that might not otherwise make it through the long and difficult publication process.

How can you help? Improve the records we have for the books you love – every record is fully editable by clicking the “edit” button on the page. If we don't have a record for a book, you can create one. If you're a library with digitized resources, tell us where they are and we'll point people to them.

Our hope is that libraries and individual book readers will join this project and together we can build towards universal access to all knowledge.

For more information