When I first read about The Open Library - a plan to build an online catalogue of every book ever published, anywhere in the world - I couldn't imagine what it was for.
But then I read the following comment from Aaron Swartz, leader of the technical team working on the site, "Right now, if you want to link to a book on the web, the main place people go is Amazon. It's kind of a bad idea for one commercial site to be the definitive source for book information on the internet, so we want to have a site that brings together information from commercial publishers, reviewers, users, libraries, everywhere."
