More on the Open-Access Text Archive

Tamina Vahidy, A New Digital Library, Line 56, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

The latest book digitization effort is The Open-Access Text Archive (OATA) run by the Internet Archive. OATA integrates with Project Gutenberg so, for those who are used to going to Gutenberg.org for their plain text or Plucker e-content, you can go to OATA instead.

The OATA has a number of advantages over the existing digital book archives we've visited. For one, it has a box marked "batting average" that ranks items by the percentage of people who downloaded them after visiting details pages. This is a refreshing complement to a mere popularity box, which OATA also has. OATA says that keeping a batting average "avoids the 'rich-get-richer' behavior of ranking by the number of downloads."

So far, the most downloaded items from OATA have been, in order, The New Hacker's Dictionary, Ethics of Sex Acts, and Pictures of ARPANET. The items with the highest batting averages are all advanced science texts....

PS:  The article brings welcome new exposure to OATA, but OATA is not "the latest book digitization effort".  It was launched in December 2004.