The plan is a book lover's dream; and the particular book lover intent on creating this Open Library is Brewster Kahle, known as the digital librarian of the internet.
Kahle made his name indexing and storing the web in his Internet Archive. His non-profit organisation, stationed in an unassuming colonial home in San Francisco's Presidio, has moved on to grab and upload all kinds of media: public domain films, audio archives, and amateur endeavours such as Project Gutenberg, which has been painstakingly hand-typing public domain texts since the 70s.
Now he has taken the idea of digitising the text of books one step further, and is storing not just the text, but, incredibly, high-resolution snapshots of book pages, good enough to reproduce every fold, blotch and texture of the world's catalogue of public domain works on your screen.
It is an ambitious project, but he has allies among other technologists, and the support of large companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. A consortium of tech companies, libraries and academic institutions has formed the Open Content Alliance, working together to create the Open Library, the future home of these works.
"Finally, a library I won't get thrown out of," said David Mandelbrot, vice-president of search technology at Yahoo, and one of the founders of the Open Content Alliance.
Book-scanning itself is a sophisticated technical challenge. The latest generation scanner used by the project produces books of 16 megapixel pages for a little over five pence per page. A cradle holds the book open in an 90 degree V-shape, while cameras perched overhead, and controlled by the scanner's central software, shoot the high resolution images. Software creates a text version, and the images themselves are collated and used to create beautiful digital books, which you can print from anywhere with the images of the text intact. All that is missing is the smell of old books.
The data collected is conveyed to the archive's "Petaboxes" - a bright red computer, tall and deeper than a bookshelf, is filled with pizza-box-shaped computers and produced by a commercial spin-off from the non-profit archive. Each box stores 80 terabytes, or the equivalent of about three Libraries of Congress.
At five pence a page, the money and support needs to be committed, but Kahle's supporters have deep pockets, and an enthusiasm for the project.
Companies like Yahoo and MSN Search are looking to make books a standard answer to internet search engine queries. Funding from Yahoo will cover 18,000 books out of the University of California's library system. MSN Search, Yahoo's Microsoft competitor, has committed to funding another 150,000 books over the next year alone, though they haven't been selected yet.
Librarians have lined up to scan in their collections, with one careful proviso that every supporter of the projects agrees to: none of these books must have been published since the 1920s.
Kahle divides the existing literary world into strata of copyright protection. In-print books are the ones you can buy and often read snippets from via Amazon. Out-of-print publications are harder to reach. What Kahle calls "orphaned works" come next: these book are out of print, and their copyright owner is un-contactable. Generally, these books are found in libraries or not at all. Finally, there is the pre-1926 world of the public domain. These are books that copyright law allows everyone to reprint, rework and convert into pristine digital formats as they see fit.
The majority of works are in the first three categories but the public domain itself remains huge. This is where the Open Library initiative is focused.
And that may be why the big boys are so interested. When the impetuous Google Print project set about scanning the very top strata, books still within copyright, it provoked a fire-storm of protest. But Kahle ducks that controversy, and has come up with something more impressive. Not just text, but real books that are free to use, and unladen with lawsuits and licences.
Kahle hopes to begin moving up to the next strata, orphaned works. These remain in a legal limbo for now, but Kahle and his supporters hope that future legislation in the US could open up more of these often disregarded works to be used in new ways.
He sees Amazon's "search inside the book" and Google Print as moving down to meet him, both burrowing to his ultimate aim. This, he defines, with a slightly tired smile, as: "Universal access to all human knowledge - one page at a time."