You may have heard of this. In fact, I'd 'heard' of it back in February, but didn't 'know' about it until this morning thanks to an article in the New York Times. Google is digitizing all the books in the world, in every language:<br>
<br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/technology/internet/02link.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/technology/internet/02link.html</a><br><a href="http://www.google.com/googlebooks/library.html">http://www.google.com/googlebooks/library.html</a><br>
<br>Personally, I think this is a really cool idea, though not one without danger. The advantage is having a virtual catalog of everything ever written, something that rivals the Internet Archive. I'm not sure though if this catalogue will contain multiple prints of each book, but that is something it should certainly include. Hopefully it will include copies of print magazines as well. The possibilities of having the entire library searchable is simply enormous. Google has also purchased a web company that had digitized newspapers, so you can expect them to expand into this area as well.<br>
<br>The disadvantage though is that all this information is controlled by one organization: Google. While Google is giving free computers to public libraries and charging everyone else subscriptions, I am uneasy about one for-profit group controlling so much of the world's information (rather than a nonprofit like Internet Archive). That's not to say you can't get books from other places, but it's still troublesome. Thankfully, I have a lifetime membership to the University of Denver library as a graduate alum, so I should be able to access all of this from home!<br>
<br>Makes you wonder as well if Google has plans to build a game library... And if they've published any papers about this.<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>The sleep of Reason produces monsters.<br><br>"Until next time..."<br>
Captain Commando<br>