10,000 Arabic books have been digitized to ebooks

SOURCE: GOOD E READER

BY: MICHAEL KOZLOWSKI

The Arabic Collections Online project has just formed and they are making available 10,000 Arabic ebooks across 6,000 subjects for free.  It was established with support from NYU Abu Dhabi, and by major grants from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and Carnegie Corporation of New York. This mass digitization project aims to feature up to 23,000 volumes from the library collections of NYU and partner institutions. These institutions are contributing published books in all fields—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections.

The mission statement behind the ACO aims to digitize, preserve, and provide free open access to a wide variety of Arabic language ebooks in subjects such as literature, philosophy, law, religion, and more. Important Arabic language content is not widely available on the web, and ACO aims to ensure global access to a rich Arabic library collection. Many older Arabic books are out-of-print, in fragile condition, and are otherwise rare materials that are in danger of being lost. ACO will ensure that this content will be saved digitally for future generations.

The ebooks can be read online through any major internet browser and also available by high resolution PDF files. This makes each book available to be read on any e-reader and can be sideloaded from your PC directly to your device.