Brewster Kahle, the man behind a project to each web page file, now wants to collect a copy of every book published

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, the nonprofit Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to a copy of each page to save ever written. Now, the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding its efforts to secure and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

"There is always a role for books \ be" Bald said, as he perched on the edge of a container being tricked soon as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch. "We want to see, books to live forever."

Kahle has so far collected over 500,000 books. He thinks the stock is even large enough to hold about a million titles, each with a specific bar code, the carton, pallet and shipping container in which it is located, identified.

Is the 's far less than the nearly 130 million different books in the Google engineers book-project estimate is involved in the world. But Kahle says the ease with which they 've purchased the first half a million donated texts makes him optimistic to achieve something, what he sees as a realistic target of 10 million pounds - the equivalent of a large university library.

"The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published. We're not going to get there, but that's our goal," he said.

Recently, workers in offices above the shop floor unpacked boxes of books and information on each title entered into a database. The books ranged from Moby Dick and The Hunchback of Notre Dame of The Complete Basic Book of Home Decorating for Dummies and Costa Rica.

At this early stage in the book-collection process, certain songs aren 't as much as large collections will be sought. Copies of books already in the archive are redonated elsewhere. If anyone needs to see an actual physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should not take more than an hour to get there.

"The idea is involved, the physical security of these physical materials for the long haul, and then have the digital versions of the world accessible," said Kahle.

Along with keeping books cool and dry, which Kahle plans to accomplish using the modified shipping cointainers, book preservation experts say he'll have to contend with vermin and about a century's worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that decays over time because of its own acidity.

Peter Hanff, deputy director of the Bancroft Library, special collections and rare books archive at the University of California, Berkeley, says that only the books kept on the west coast of the U.S. they are on the fluctuations of the climate, that the norm in the other parts of the country save.

He praises the digitization as a way of books, manuscripts and other material easily accessible. But he also believes that digital does not make obsolete the physical object. He said that people feel "intimate bond" with artifacts - a letter from Albert Einstein or a piece of papyrus written thousands of years.

"Some people only respond with a strong emotional feeling," said Hanff. "You are suddenly something that is truly connected old and brings you back in time."

Kahle said he simply had a strong reaction to the idea that books discarded.

"Knowledge lives in many different forms over time," he said. "At first people in the war 's memories, then it is in manuscripts, printed books, then, then microfilm, CD-ROMS, digital now on the Internet. Each of these generations is very important."

Each new format as it arises rather than to the end-all way to package information stopped. But Kahle pointed out that digital books have a physical home to the hard disk somewhere. He sees salvation of the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future. (In addition to planning books, Kahle's Internet Archive 's old servers that were replaced late last year to save.)

Kahle sees the book library to be less like a different Library of Congress (which has 33 million books, according to the library 's website) and more like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an underground cave Arctic refuge backup copies of the world built' s Food seed. The books are not meant to be given at regular intervals, but will be protected as an authoritative reference copies, if the digital version somehow disappears or asks a question at all, about one ebook 's faithfulness print edition.

"The thing that 'm concerned about is that people think it's disrespectful of pounds. They think we' I \ re just burying them all in the basement," said Kahle. But he says it 's dedication to the survival of the books that drives this project. "These are objects that always live another day."