Public library made of QR codes and NFC stickers opens in Austria

mobile qr codes in library

mobile qr codes in library

City of Klagenfurt can now make books available to borrow for smartphone owners.

Though the city of Klagenfurt, Austria, has never had a public library before, it has how opened the doors to the next best thing, which is made up of NFC stickers and QR codes.

The mobile features give users access to a broad selection of different ebooks.

There are 70 stickers for NFC and QR codes in total. They are located all over the city and direct individuals who use them to a website with pages that allow them to download the works that are in the public domain. The majority of them come from the massive Project Gutenberg, but there are others, as well.

The stickers have been placed in strategic locations with NFC stickers and QR codes that link to volumes that are related to the spot in which they can be found. For example, near the police station, readers can find the sticker for The Killer, by Arthur Schnitzler.

The team behind this digital public library project is hoping that by August, they will have formed partnerships with local talent, as well, in order to be able to distribute a vast array of different forms of digital content, such as books and music.

In order to create a greater focus on the location itself, the team has disallowed search engines from being able to crawl and index the links to which the QR codes and NFC stickers will direct the users. Therefore, if users want to take advantage of the links, they must visit Klagenfurt and not simply Google the topic.

However, the group behind the project doesn’t intend to keep all the secrets to their success to themselves. It is their hope that they will soon be able to release instructions that show other cities how to replicate this type of system, so that local virtual libraries will become available around the world.

Books available through these QR codes and through the NFC stickers include both fiction and nonfiction. The team behind the project is from the local Project Ingeborg not for profit organization.

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