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A party was held in San Francisco last night that could be a preview of the way we will access Ebooks and research materials in the future. The Internet Archive, founded a decade or so ago by Brewster Kahle and dedicated to “universal access to all the world’s knowledge” showed off it’s new headquarters in a former church (how poetically fitting) at a get together for friends and industry insiders.

However, when you have quests like professional visionary Howard Rheingold, EFF stalwart and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, library studies theorist Eli Edwards, and Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly over for drinks you don’t just play Twister and watch the World Series. Instead you demo a new way of organizing and distributing the sum of human knowledge…and serve canapés of course.

Read on after the jump to learn more about a story that sounds like it could be J.K. Rowling’s next best seller…Brewster Kahle and the Fount of Universal Knowledge.

Internet Archive’s BookServer project isn’t a new discovery at Hogwarts, but it could be. It is all about creating a way for any search engine to sift through and index books as if they were web pages, accessing a vast array of books that are available from a wide group of sources, far more than can be easily reached now. Using BookServer, publishers, libraries and individual authors would have a way to index their work and offer easy distribution as Ebooks. Rather than entering a question or keyword and getting a link to a web page, you would enter information and see links for downloading relevant books, generated by BookServer

The project is designed around viewing BookServer as just like any other Web server, distributing information on request. Kahle feels that the main element that has been missing from a workable system to make all books digitally available has been a good indexing system, which BookServer provides. Since BookServer is device agnostic you can use any Ebook Reader, phone or computer to access the Ebooks on BookServer, all you need is an internet connection.

Daniel Terdiman at CNET spoke to Kahle, and he had this to say about the current situation for Ebook publishers and how he intends to change it…

Today, Kahle said, publishers, libraries, and others usually turn to outsiders to build them an online distribution system, and that each of those systems stands alone and unindexable. With BookServer, the Internet Archive is hoping that for the first time, consumers everywhere will be able to buy or borrow any text they want while leaving control over pricing and terms of such distribution in the hands of the content owners.

One of the attendees at the debut last night spoke to me about the demo…

At the party, Brewster demonstrated how an inexpensive OLPC device could call an EPUB version of an Internet Archive book in the public domain, then showed how one could use a Kindle to get a .mobi file of a public domain book from the Archive. Then he showed how one could find ebooks for sale directly by publishers using BookServer, in formats such as the one for the iPhone and how books otherwise in-print and inaccessible for regular download are now available in a format for the visually impaired to download from BookServer into screenreader devices.

I think this could be really exciting … getting high quality scans or really good text formats done with sophisticated OCR … multiple formats, multiple devices … I have to think it’s all good. What was unveiled today was the back-end architecture. When it comes to the public domain texts that are already in the Open Library/Internet Archive … those are freely available, at no cost to the user.

I see BookServer, in conjunction with the rising tide of Ebook Readers, as a real step forward for Ebook distribution and access. As texts become easier to search for, find, and download (and Ebook Reader prices drop) people will be encouraged to use Ebooks more and more. On top of that BookServer will allow publishers and authors to have far more control over how readers access their work (and how much they pay for the privilege). Once middlemen such as Amazon are not as crucial to the whole process, readers will have one fewer wall standing between themselves and a staggering amount of information. It is all out there, more every day thanks to the work of such groups as the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and yes, even Google Books. The trick has always been how to find what you want and get a hold of it easily. BookServer may be the first real, feasible step towards solving that problem.

Ordinarily a cynic such as I would laugh at such a lofty, seemingly impossible goal as “universal access to all the world’s knowledge”, and dismiss it as Harry Potter-like fantasy.

I’m not laughing anymore.