Kalev Leetaru programatically recovered all the images that were discarded by the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books scanned by the Archive; these were cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr with the text that appears before and after them, and links to see their whole scanned page.
The resulting mosiac is just wonderful, like browsing Sean Tejaratchi's great zine Crap Hound, but weirder and more serendipitous. And each image is richly annotated with metadata, freely re-usable, and is a gateway to a book that you can have for free. What more could you ask for?
Internet Archive Book Images
(via Ars Technica)
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