Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Digital Books
Tabercil writes "The New York Times has an article about the mass scanning of books, which argues that actions such as Google's Book Search project are an inevitable outgrowth of the internet." From the article: "Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there?"
I may be old fashioned, but doesn't that seem a bit outlandish? I mean, I know, people would have said that about gigabytes in the days of yore, but still. When do we reach the fundamental limit of information density per unit space? Anyone with knowledge on this care to comment?