The objective of this project is to create a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, primarily in the English language, available to everyone over the Internet. This task is accomplished by scanning the books and indexing their full text. The text file is created, where possible, through optical character recognition. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7x365, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.

Typical large high-school libraries house fewer than 30,000 volumes. One million volumes is the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University . The total number of different titles indexed in OCLC’s WorldCat is about 48 million. One million books, therefore, is more than the holdings of any high-school, equivalent to the library at a substantial university and a significant fraction of all available books.