Google Helps Make A Big Digital Library
April 24, 2020
As a technology company, Google claims that it operates for the betterment of humankind. Google’s main purpose is to make a buck, but when not chasing profit the search engine giant does do other things. Google operates on the edge of cutting technology, because the company is constantly investing and inventing new ideas. It also focuses on projects that preserve the past. In a manner similar to the Internet Archive and historical institutions, Google is working with the “City Of Antwerp And Google To Digitize 100,000 Books.”
While the blog post claims that book publishing is limited to the “dignified and highbrow” society, the true publishing industry has more in common with its sixteenth century predecessor:
“But it was a different story in the 16th century, about a hundred years after the invention of the printing press. Publishing was a high-risk, high-reward proposition: With the right backing and enough capital investment, an entrepreneur could become wildly successful. But publishing the wrong thing in the wrong place could be disastrous—even fatal, with governments and religious authorities taking a very severe view of what content was fit to print.”
During the sixteenth century, Christophe Plantin established his own publishing house in Antwerp, Belgium. He dealt wit religious persecution, but that did not prevent him from becoming a printing powerhouse that continued for generations. Plantin’s house is now an UNESCO World Heritage Site, a museum, and houses 25,000 early printed books. Google and Antwerp have teamed up to digitize over 32,000 books from the museum and 60,000 more from the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.
The partnership will result in more than 100,000 books from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries being digitized and accessed freely through Google Books and the libraries’ catalogues. The books are in the public domain and will contain full text search. The digitization project starts in 2021. Before that Antwerp and Google are sorting out the logistics.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2020
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