Bibliotecha

The last session of Off the Press was opened by André Castro, who introduced participants to the Bibliotecha project. André is a sound artist from Lisbon, currently living in Rotterdam. He completed the Master’s program of Media Design and Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2013, and graduated in 2007 from the Sonic Arts BA program at Middlesex University. He developed Bibliotecha in collaboration with : Yoana Buzova ,Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, Max Dovey, Michaela Lakova and Roel Roscam Abbing.

Andre Castro explaining the specificities of Bibliotecha

André explained the motivation behind creating Bibliotecha as frustration with sharing knowledge. As he explained, due to legal regulations, lecturers at universities couldn’t upload texts online and students wanted to be able to share study materials outside the university regulations. Paradoxically, EPUBs are less shareable than print books, because there are no indexed databases where one could find extensive range of publications on particular topic (as opposed to highly organised library collections). As a result, a Hackaton dedicated to finding solution for sharing ePubs resulted in the prototype of Bibliotehca. The idea was initiated by Marcel Mars and Femke Snelting at Impact Festival Utrecht.

Andre Castro and Florian Cramer

In technical terms, Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections.The Bibliotecha grows organically with each member adds EPubs and thus the community grows. They work with Raspberry Pie software and Calibre.

Find out more at : www.bibliotecha.info

Contact André : andre[AT]andrecastro.info