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The Future of Digital Books

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-library-at-alexandia dept.

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?"

4 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Easy. by gardyloo · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    10001010100101001010000001010111101001010010100101

  2. Don't believe them by TheKidWho · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Don't believe these people... This project is simply part of the Government's control on teh people.... They are working on a time machine, soon this database will also be able to read books that haven't even been written yet, books that are from the future... Once they can do that, THEY WILL CONTROL US...

    STOP THE GOVERNMENT STOP GOOGLE!!!

    You have been warned...

  3. 2 words... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    IN MY ASS!

    sir thats 3 words... ...it's ok, it's electronic we can just edit it!

  4. 50 Petabytes on an Ipod? by moultano · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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?