It seems Google has quite a challenge on its hands with its project to digitise every book on the internet. I thought that it could simple put an entry for every ISBN number and then digitise them like that until it was up to date and was simply digitising new books. Books without an ISBN number would simply have one generated and it would then be scanned. Silly me. It seems that many things have ISBN numbers, including for some reason turkey probes, so it’s not so simple.
Read here to see how they went about their calculations that there are 129,864,880 books that need to be in their database.
Anyway, I think that that number seems low. In saying that I have no idea how many books there are missing. I would guess that over the last 50 years, around where ISBN came into being, was the start of cheap printing and the pulp fiction explosion so I would suspect that most of the books would have ISBN numbers. Subtract all the odd documents, and the turkey probes, and you must have a good proportion of the written works since man started putting pen to paper. Add a couple of million for books that have been hand written and stored in some dark library somewhere and that should be it. But that makes it much less. Maybe I overestimated the written creativity in our species.
No matter how you add them up it’s a hell of a lot of books. More than I will ever read and I like books. I have only read about 0.001% of the books available to me. How many fantastic books have I missed? With a bit of luck they will make the books downloadable so we can build our own databases of books based on our favourite subjects or themes. I would love a cookbook version that had all the cookbooks and recopies in and then you could search by whatever criteria you want.
I wonder what versions of boos will they be putting in there? Will they put the orginal Grimms fairy tales in for example or go for the nice version.
An ambitious project that still has many legal issues to overcome before it is complete. So many actually that I wonder if they will make it. We will see. With so many things that could happen to our species I suspect a doomsday vault is a good idea. If we did bite the bullet like the dinosaurs and some other species finds the database with everything in it I wonder what they would make of our fictional entertainment. Books like the Koran, the Bible and Gordon Browns books on Courage.
An ambitious project
It seems Google has quite a challenge on its hands with its project to digitise every book on the internet. I thought that it could simple put an entry for every ISBN number and then digitise them like that until it was up to date and was simply digitising new books. Books without an ISBN number would simply have one generated and it would then be scanned. Silly me. It seems that many things have ISBN numbers, including for some reason turkey probes, so it’s not so simple.
Read here to see how they went about their calculations that there are 129,864,880 books that need to be in their database.
Anyway, I think that that number seems low. In saying that I have no idea how many books there are missing. I would guess that over the last 50 years, around where ISBN came into being, was the start of cheap printing and the pulp fiction explosion so I would suspect that most of the books would have ISBN numbers. Subtract all the odd documents, and the turkey probes, and you must have a good proportion of the written works since man started putting pen to paper. Add a couple of million for books that have been hand written and stored in some dark library somewhere and that should be it. But that makes it much less. Maybe I overestimated the written creativity in our species.
No matter how you add them up it’s a hell of a lot of books. More than I will ever read and I like books. I have only read about 0.001% of the books available to me. How many fantastic books have I missed? With a bit of luck they will make the books downloadable so we can build our own databases of books based on our favourite subjects or themes. I would love a cookbook version that had all the cookbooks and recopies in and then you could search by whatever criteria you want.
I wonder what versions of boos will they be putting in there? Will they put the orginal Grimms fairy tales in for example or go for the nice version.
An ambitious project that still has many legal issues to overcome before it is complete. So many actually that I wonder if they will make it. We will see. With so many things that could happen to our species I suspect a doomsday vault is a good idea. If we did bite the bullet like the dinosaurs and some other species finds the database with everything in it I wonder what they would make of our fictional entertainment. Books like the Koran, the Bible and Gordon Browns books on Courage.