Google's efforts to digitize every printed letter in the world--or something to that effect--has the Economist wondering what books will look like in the future.
IN SECRET locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google, the world's largest web-search company...
...a conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year. The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.
Google's is not the only project of its kind. The Internet Archive, for instance, is a non-profit organisation founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a San Francisco idealist who wants to re-create a modern Library of Alexandria containing all public-domain texts and videos. Amazon has been scanning books, as have Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google's biggest rivals in web-search, and individual libraries around the world. Eager not to be left out, publishers are also doing the same. But Google's effort, in scale and ambition, is off the charts.
Our curiosity about the future of books leads to many questions--and ultimately to one final question: the last one below:
As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology "unbind" books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?
Most of us wonder what books will look like. But technology will explode the variety of delivery. The better question might be: what will commercial reading look like in the future? We can only begin to fathom the answers...
Comments