Brewster Kahle
July 26, 2004 02:27 AM
"A Conversation with Brewster Kahle."
Creating a library of Alexandria for the digital age:A 100-page black-and-white book with current toner and paper costs in the United States is $1, not figuring labor costs, rights costs, or depreciation of capital. That’s an interesting number, because at a buck a book, it turns out that for a library, it could be less expensive to give books away than to loan them. In his book, Practical Digital Libraries, Michael Lesk reported that it cost Harvard incrementally $2 to loan a book out and bring it back and put it on the shelf. This is not figuring in the warehousing costs and all the building costs. This is just the incremental cost of loaning a book out. Even if you put some fee in for the author, it looks cost effective to print and bind many books locally.