All knowledge at-your-fingertips?

Google has debuted “Google Print” in beta and it’s now there for your playing and searching pleasure.

What is the point of this effort? “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, but much of that information isn’t yet online. Google Print aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily right in your Google search results.” An admirable initiative.

But Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive has done much of this *and* has spread out the Archive’s scope to encompass audio, movies, and more. Brewster’s mission? “The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.”

If you’d like to actually hear Brewster Kahle describing this mission in great detail (and it is very entertaining and enlightening), travel over to IT Conversations and download Brewster’s talk. Also, you can peek at an earlier post I did on the announcement on Google Print.