Ten major international libraries have agreed to combine their digitised book collections into a free text-based archive hosted online by the not-for-profit Internet Archive. All content digitised and held in the text archive will be freely available to online users.

Two major US libraries have agreed to join the scheme: Carnegie Mellon University library and The Library of Congress have committed their Million Book Project and American Memory Projects, respectively, to the text archive. The projects both provide access to digitised collections.

The Canadian universities of Toronto, Ottawa and McMaster have agreed to add their collections, as have China's Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Science, the European Archives and Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

In a statement, the Internet Archive describes the Text Archive as an Open Access archive that will "ensure permanent and public access to our published heritage". Over a million books have been committed to the Text Archive by the member institutes, with 50,000 available in the first quarter of 2005.

The San Francisco-based Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build a library for the internet that offered access to historical collections. It's most well-known online project is the Wayback Machine, which harvests snapshots of freely-available websites.

Announced 24 hours after Google's tie-up with the university libraries of Oxford, Stanford, Michigan and Harvard, and the New York Public Library, the Internet Archive project is likely to be seen as the first of many alternatives to the Google Print library.

Internet Archive said: "Commercial companies are currently working with libraries to digitise materials as well. We are encouraging these efforts and hope most of these materials will also be available through Text Archives."