An international consortium of universities and libraries announced Tuesday they have digitized more than 1.5 million books and made them available through a single website.

The Million Book Project, also known as the Universal Digital Library, said the collection includes books in more than 20 languages, with titles ranging from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to The Analects of Confucius.

Two-thirds of the books scanned so far are written in Chinese script, with most of the remainder of the titles written in English. The bulk of the scanning, digitization and cataloguing for the project has been performed in China and India.

The project, begun in 2002, is a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt.

Founder Raj Reddy, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, said in a statement the online archive gives internet users access to a collection the size of a large university library.

"This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language," he said. "The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling."

Although the project has the long-term goal of making the books, artwork and other published works available for free, less than 10 per cent of the books currently online are available at no cost, the group said in a statement.

Microsoft, Google and the Internet Archive are all working on similar book-scanning projects, all designed to grant greater access to works of literature and reference and also provide an online storage facility to preserve older works.

The projects have attracted a great deal of attention, in part because of copyright issues.

Google, in particular, has faced a number of legal battles since it launched the project in 2005 over its practice of scanning books regardless of copyright but only displaying snippets of the books in what it considers "fair use."

Both the U.S. Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have sued the company in an effort to stop the scanning of books without permission.