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Google Opens Digital Library to EU
Kailash Nadh writes "Google Inc. is asking European book publishers to submit non-English material to its Internet-leading search engine a move that may ease worries about the company's digital library relying too heavily on Anglo-American content. The Google Print undertaking represents a major piece of Google's effort to convert printed material into a digital format so it can be called up from any computing device with an Internet connection. By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue."
I thought they were doing it because they wanted to show off.
I expect you're joking, but just in case...
Given the proportion of the world that speaks languages other than English it'd be a very poor business strategy to limit your service to English-only sources.
By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue
Is that a fact or an assumption?
It seems like the attitude toward Google is changing a lot. A few years ago I don't think we would have thought Google's motivation would be necessarily to gain massive revenue, but instead to create just a huge database for the public good...
If programmatic translation continues to improve then this could really be something huge. Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language, available to anyone who desires in their native tongue.
Google Search
Google Maps
Gmail
Google Library
Froogle
Google Offline
Google Talk
etc.
It's just a matter of time before Google TV will appear. Google's goal seem to be to wrap itself all around you.
On a more serious note, how does one insure the intergrity of digital collections. Things can disappear or be replaced with more politically acceptable alternatives.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
If digital information was stored with the same level of redundancy that "analog" data is stored with, these issues wouldn't exist. In fact, even a low level of redundancy would probably be sufficient to protect against nearly all loss. The "analog" records you refer to can be reconstructed not because they were stored on paper, but because the complete record can be restored from a small fraction of the original, making the paper record much like a simple, but massively redundant, RAID array. With digital records, we can move those portions we care to keep into proper archives before they disappear. If it wasn't illegal to copy the information on those CDs, then with proper care (including periodic transfers to new discs) the information on them really could be preserved forever. The process would be completely lossless and nearly automatic, whereas a paper document (which will still eventually become unreadable, albiet over a much longer period of time) can only be copied by hand, with a much greater (and thus less likely) expenditure of effort. Finally, the information in a paper document is fundamentally symbolic in nature, and thus equivalent to the corresponding digital information. It is not analog, because the information is stored as sequences of a finite number of discrete patterns. The underlying analog medium (the ink and paper, for example) can degrade gradually, but the words themselves are either preserved as written or not. Any symbolic information (including digital) could be stored on the same medium, and would be similarly preserved.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Thank you for reminding us that as far as America is concerned, Europe ends at the German and the Italian borders (and doesn't include a bunch of countries even west of there). It's now officially okay to forget about Poland, Belgium, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Latvia, Sweden, Lithuana, Finland, and Austria.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
I hope that we don't end up getting rid of the hard copies for archival purposes...
There is one or two copies of many books; one library fire, and they're gone. In many cases, they're virtually gone now; the only way to view the copy is to travel to where the physical copy is and get easily denied permission to view it.
There is a film that shows a clip from an earlier film, and proclaims that it will be watched for generations. That clip is all that exists of that earlier film.
There's no chance that any of the modern popular films will disappear completely. It may come down to recovering it from a DivX, but enough people have copies and make backups of those copies, that it won't completely disappear. If the Internet Archive was destroyed, films that formerly existed in few copies would still be on hard drives all over the world, and will be on backups well into the 22cd century.