An Inside Look At One Of Google's Most Controversial Projects
Books have carried the world's knowledge for millennia.
Famed sci-fi author HG Wells once hypothesized "a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent 'World Encyclopedia' that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information."
He wrote a book about the idea called "The World Brain."
Something like this would, at least in part, require gathering as many "old fashioned" books as possible to squeeze out all the information contained within them.
But there are a lot of books out there! Such an undertaking would require lots of time and money.
Enter Google, a company with the resources and commitment to info organization to make such a thing come to light..
At a cost estimated between $30 and $100 per book, the company began digitizing books by coordinating with libraries around the world to borrow as many books as possible, copyrighted and uncopyrighted alike.
In Google's vision, the world's libraries could then essentially be accessed from a single central point online.
Robert Darnton of the Harvard University Library was happy to let the company digitize the library's public domain books. Other libraries offered up copyrighted books as well.
Google even scanned old texts from a monastery in Spain.
Similar efforts have been made in the past. Michael Hart's Project Gutenberg is the world's oldest digital library, archiving public domain writings since 1971.
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive not only aims to catalog all books, but all web content as well.
IBM's Watson supercomputer famously beat its human opponents in an exhibition match of Jeopardy due to its ability to process natural language and access huge stores of data taken from the Internet and libraries alike.
This is a still frame from the only known video footage (six seconds long) of an actual Google book scanning setup.
Famed futurist and current Google employee Ray Kurzweil is acknowledged as the inventor of OCR, or optical character recognition, which is the technology that enables a computer to convert a scanned document into digital text.
Advanced book scanning setups use professional cameras and lighting to capture incredibly high quality images before running them through OCR software and uploading them to the Internet.
Proponents of Google Books love it for many reasons, not only for the instant access to any book, but for the fact that books can essentially become immortal when scanned and stored digitally. No more lost books due to floods or fires.
But the opponents of the project want to be fairly compensated for their work. The Authors Guild sprang for legal action.
Kevin Kelly of Wired sees it as perfectly legal and useful. He said that all ideas are built on top of other ideas, so no one can "own" an idea.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former director of the National Library of France, found the idea appalling. He wants to protect culture and artists' rights.
There was, of course, a court case to address the matter. It was resolved last month when Judge Denny Chin ruled that digitizing books was transformative enough that it was fair use.
We suspect paper books aren't going anywhere anytime, and with Google's book scanning operation moving forward with the law's blessing, e-books are here to stay.
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