Interesting piece in Spiegel on-line today about Google’s continuing project to digitize just about every piece of printed material on the face of the planet. Apart from this being a mammoth undertaking when you consider that the Google search page could end up being the gateway to the content of the 32 million books, 750 million articles, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 films, 3 million television programs and 100 billion public Web pages that Wired writer Kevin Kelly estimates humanity has published since the days of clay tablets. To store this volume of data -- estimated at 50 petabytes -- would require a building the size of a town's library. But having used the resource when researching “MadScam,” and using it now while writing my next book; I’m all in favor of it. I’ll leave the question raised by some that it seems a bit risky to entrust the universal wisdom stored in the world’s mostly public libraries to a private company, to others to answer.
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You'll need the bolt cutters before you can scan them!
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George:
It is going to be interesting how this plays out. I think we are waking up to the potential consequences of a world digitized by Google
You might enjoy my recent post "The First Cracks in Google's Attempt to Digitize the World"
Where did you get that photo of the books in chains?
Posted by: Michael Lieberman | March 30, 2007 12:02 PM | Permalink to Comment