For the initiative, Yahoo! has entered into a partnership with several groups, including the Internet Archive, Adobe Systems Inc., HP Labs, and the University of California. The newly formed Open Content Alliance will run the venture.

The new alliance will begin almost entirely with texts in the public domain, but will eventually move on to copyrighted texts, at which point advertising possibilities may arise, according to Yahoo!'s Vice President of Search Content David Mandelbrot.

"We have not started talking to advertisers yet, because our main focus right now is the archiving project itself," said Mandelbrot. "There is definitely the possibility to monetize this content in the future, but we still haven't decided whether we're going to."

Providing the initial content--including books and multimedia such as spoken word audio, video, and music--will be The University of California, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the U.K., O'Reilly Media, and Prelinger Archives.

"Today, a lot of people go to libraries for the multimedia content, so it was important to include as much as we could in the project," Mandelbrot said.

Asked about the advertising that might accompany such content, Mandelbrot said it was too early to speculate about the details of future opportunities.

The Authors Guild sued Google last week, alleging that its scanning of copyright protected books infringes copyright, even if only small excerpts are displayed in search results as Google plans. Google has publicly maintained that the project adheres to the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law, which allows excerpts from certain texts.

In August, Google suspended its scanning of copyrighted books until Nov. 1.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit founded to make historical collections that exist in digital format publicly available, will host the content, and Hewlett-Packard Labs is providing technology for scanning books.

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