GOOGLE'S MOON SHOT at The New Yorker.
"No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. "We think that we can do it all inside of ten years," Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company's headquarters, in Mountain View, California. "It's mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot."
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New Yorker, has an excellent article on Google's plan to scan all the books they can get their hands on into digital:
The legal assertion at the core of Google's business plan is its purported right to scan millions of copyrighted books without payment to or…
Have a look at at this interesting article, from The New Yorker, about the boom in Bible publishing:
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles…
It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and…
Nature has a list of the top news stories of 2008, and "Personal genomics goes mainstream" comes up second:
In January, an international consortium announced the launch of the 1,000 Genomes Project, which aims to provide a catalogue of human genetic variation. In October, the Personal Genome…
"In my own insignificant way, I am trying to understand why white rabbits are cute and how some people are able to pull it out of their rear."
This is cute, but crass and vacuous. I won't take anything you say seriously.