Save the Sci-Fi!

I learned of an admirable Kickstarter project the other day thanks to Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont of the Sword and Laser podcast, and I thought those who follow my blog might be interested in knowing about it. It’s the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi project.

What they aim to do is save as many old, out of print sci-fi books as possible. Each month they pick a great classic or obscure or otherwise awesome sci-fi book that’s not in print and not online. They track down the author or whoever holds the copyright. They acquire the copyright or get permission from the rightsholder, and turn the book into an ebook for online publication. The resulting ebooks are either free or very cheap.

The Kickstarter for the project helps to fund these efforts to track down and acquire copyrights for the books they save, as well as fund development of the website and open source book scanner they make use of.

There are far too many books out there that are at serious risk of being lost if the paper degrades and nothing is done to preserve them, so this is a fantastic project well worth backing, or at the very least learning about.

There’s several bits of good news about it. The first is that they’re fully funded up to their goal of $15,000. The second is that as of this writing, they have 11 days to go, so you can still contribute and drive them even further past their goal—they sit right now at $24,059. With 11 days left, it doesn’t seem impossible that they’ll double what they were looking for.

Check them out at the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi Kickstarter! And be sure to let me know in the comments if you decided to back them.