crowdsourcing

#Bookcamping

20 January 2012

From the ashes of the 15M movement (you know, the Spanish-born Indignados similar to the Wall Street mov in the US) was born one of those initiatives that may or may not survive in the long term… with all those Google Books and e-book marketplaces initiatives, but it’s nice to always have small initiatives like #Bookcamping.

In fact, #bookcamping is a Spanish initiative (for now) aimed at the Spanish-speaking community which hosts a virtual library where you can link and download content in various formats  (text, audio, video). Their objective is to “socialize” reading and promote the sharealike (aka Creative Commons) culture.

You can find books on politics, counterculture movements, poetry, visual & graphic arts, science… and a large number of bizarrities that go from “Sonic Death” (the fanzine Sonic Youth used to auto-edit last century) to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”.

 Now … you may be thinking… those two haven’t been released under a creative commons license right? Right, they’re copyright, so here’s an issue for Silvia Nanclares and her team to organise the messy camping they’ve created so far: anyone can upload and download scanned or digital books. And now that we’ve recently got to know Megaupload got closed by some big brother, well… they should carefully pay attention to what the people are uploading.

Bookcamping
Bookcamping

One of the objectives of their about-to-finnish crowdfunding campaign (via Kickstarter Spanish-version “Goteo”) is precisely to “clean” and host only “free” content (for distribution at least we suppose), and that is a big challenge. Although if they succeed… and without looking at Google Books of course, maybe #bookcamping could become an amazing library for CC digitalized goods just like the Gutenberg project or some sort of Europeana. The initiative is not groundbreaking… but their ambitions are: involving editorial houses themselves or creating new business models around free licenses. Easy right?

Hopefully they’ll get very far, in the meanwhile you can help with a little donation to their crowdfunding campaign which finishes this Sunday. Good luck!

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