- 28 Jul 2010 - 15:14 - 15 Oct 2010 - 15:14
- 22 Nov 2010 - 14:54 - 26 Nov 2010 - 14:54
Google Starts Mass Digitization Of Books
By maureen
Submitted on 15 January, 2010 - 10:05
ShareThisThe mass digitization of large volumes of books has begun. The initiative, which is being spearheaded by Google, will be carried out in five major US libraries. The goal of mass digitization is not to create collections but to digitize everything, or in this case, every book ever printed.
To do this economically and with some speed, mass digitization is based on the efficient photographing of books, page-by-page, and subjecting those images to optical character recognition (OCR) software to produce searchable text. For more details, see Mass Digitization of Books.
So why digitize books? We must accept that the majority of knowledge and information in the world is found in books, scrolls and or manuscripts. Since time immemorial, our history has been recorded by mankind in written formats in hope of learning from those who had the foresight to record and teach future generations of their history.
The recent technologies that were developed in the mid-20th Century have provided mankind with not only unique opportunities to digitize information but to also to disseminate it via a number of channels using a variety of dissemination tools.
Mass digitization of books is a very great initiative by Google because, given the fact that people are slowly but steadily moving from manual systems to computerized systems, it will be a great idea to access a book of one’s choice online. It will also make it possible for more books to be utilized, other than having them shelved for years. In other words, the readership of some books will increase.
However, there are negative implications of this mass digitization of books by Google. How much will Google charge the people accessing these books online given the fact that they have practically “copied” them and duplicated them from university libraries at no cost?
