We are told that “the Million Book Project has exceeded its goal of digitizing one million books by 2007. ” Well, I can think of a million books that I’d never want to look at, and I can think of a million books that I would give up my life to preserve. Or your life, at least.

Which million does the Million Book Project address? And how? And why?

I don’t know about why, but I am deeply offended and seriously worried about the “how” part … about the fact that the very first words you encounter if you go to the US site of the million book project are:

“Use Internet Explorer to…..” (look at these books).

Uffda!

I assume nefarious, evil, underhanded things involving Bill Gates and possibly some unsuspecting innocent animals … either as sacrificial objects, or possibly as object’s of Mr. Gates affections …. I don’t know, one hears things that one would prefer not to believe or even think about… Anyway, evil nefarious things have presumably happened if the first thing the ultimate book digitizing project has to say is “Use Internet Explorer….”

It is simply disgusting and very troubling.

I assume the site is using a Microsoft backend because, well, the site does not actually work very well, if at all. So far I have not seen a single book among the million book site’s collection because I keep getting server errors and timeouts. Nothing else. They may have digitized a million books but, at the moment, we are not allowed to see any of them.

Somewhere along the line, somebody made a bad decision. I won’t say any more until I have learned the details. Nor will I give you the link. I don’t give links to dead sites.