Google Books: Chugging Right Along
July 1, 2011
Search Engine Watch’s article “Google-British Library Partnership to Digitize 250,000 Books” reminded us that Google Books is chugging along. With Google working overtime to showcase itself as a portal and really fascinating legal issues surfacing in France, the once high profile Google goal of gathering the world’s information has drifted into the background.
But Google is beavering away with books. Its partner is the British Library. The project will add 250,000 books to the already 12 million-plus that Google has already scanned. These books are copyright free, and come from the British Library’s unique works collection. As with previous projects, completed in cooperation with over 40 libraries, Google will make these works available to anyone for non-commercial use, including reproduction and modification. The Library will also keep an archive of the files.
The documents will be searchable, of course. Rumor has it that Google will also assemble language usage and other data from the texts to add to their datasets.
Google keeps looking for angles on digitizing books. The article reported:
Google still has a long way to go if it wants to meet its ambitious aim: digitizing all of the world’s known 129,864,880 books by the end of 2019. This goal, announced by Google in August of last year, involves creating a digital library of over four billion pages. With many major libraries having unique copies of historical texts, partnerships like the one with the British Library are vital to that goal.
My hunch is that in one or more of Google legal battles, the issue of books, reuse, copyright, and other issues will be glued to the tar ball Google has become. In the meantime, eBooks are hot and Google’s role in their diffusion is likely to be significant. I just don’t know in what way. The British Library is a big name.
Cynthia Murrell July 1, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
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[…] Google Books: Chugging Right Along Beyond Search: Search Engine Watch’s article “Google-British Library Partnership to Digitize 250,000 Books” reminded us that Google Books is chugging along. With Google working overtime to showcase itself as a portal and really fascinating legal issues surfacing in France, the once high profile Google goal of gathering the world’s information has drifted into the background. […]