Internet Archivist, Brewster Kahle

Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.

Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

The early 1980s

Since Kahle's undergraduate years in the early 1980s, he has devoted his intellectual energy to figuring out how to create what he calls a digital version of ancient Egypt's legendary Library of Alexandria. He currently leads an initiative called Open Library, which has scanned an estimated 3 million books now available for free on the Web.

Many of these books for scanning were borrowed from libraries. Nevertheless Kahle said he began noticing that when the books were returned, the libraries were at times getting rid of them to make more room on their shelves. Once a book was digitized, the rationale went, the book itself was no longer needed. In spite of his life's devotion to the promise of digital innovation, Kahle found his faith in bits and bytes wasn't strong enough to cast paper and ink aside. Even as an ardent believer in the promise of the Internet to make knowledge more accessible to more people than ever, he feared the rise of an overconfident digital utopianism about electronic books.

"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said. "First it was in people's memories, at that time it was in manuscripts, then and there printed books, at that time microfilm, CD-ROMS, now on the digital Internet. Each one of these generations is very important."

The end-all way to package information

Each new format as it emerges tends to be hailed as the end-all way to package information. Nevertheless Kahle points out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere. He sees saving the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future.