Yahoo has unveiled a new project to digitize books in the public domain. The company is partnering with the newly formed Open Content Alliance, which aims to offer PDF documents of books to the public at no charge.

"The opportunity is to live up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then take it a step further: universal access to all knowledge," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build a library for the internet that offers access to historical collections. Its most well-known online project is the Wayback Machine, which indexes historical snapshots of websites.

Other partners in the Open Content Alliance include the universities of California and Toronto, the UK National Archives, HP Labs and Adobe.

The project is using optical character recognition technology to create digital versions of works in the public domain. The Internet Archive will host the content and Yahoo will index the text.

"In-copyright still has some twists and turns to go, but at least we can get substantial work going on the public domain," said Kahle.

The project is similar to Google Print, in which the search engine firm is digitally scanning books.

But Google's efforts also include copyrighted materials, which has led to a backlash against the project which is currently on hold.

Google also plans to keep its library closed, offering searchers only excerpts from the books.

Participants in the Open Content Alliance unveiled their plans just 24 hours after Google announced Google Print last year.