[game_preservation] Google's project to digitize all the books in the world

[Devin Monnens]

You may have heard of this. In fact, I'd 'heard' of it back in February, but
didn't 'know' about it until this morning thanks to an article in the New
York Times. Google is digitizing all the books in the world, in every
language:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/technology/internet/02link.html
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/library.html

Personally, I think this is a really cool idea, though not one without
danger. The advantage is having a virtual catalog of everything ever
written, something that rivals the Internet Archive. I'm not sure though if
this catalogue will contain multiple prints of each book, but that is
something it should certainly include. Hopefully it will include copies of
print magazines as well. The possibilities of having the entire library
searchable is simply enormous. Google has also purchased a web company that
had digitized newspapers, so you can expect them to expand into this area as
well.

The disadvantage though is that all this information is controlled by one
organization: Google. While Google is giving free computers to public
libraries and charging everyone else subscriptions, I am uneasy about one
for-profit group controlling so much of the world's information (rather than
a nonprofit like Internet Archive). That's not to say you can't get books
from other places, but it's still troublesome. Thankfully, I have a lifetime
membership to the University of Denver library as a graduate alum, so I
should be able to access all of this from home!

Makes you wonder as well if Google has plans to build a game library... And
if they've published any papers about this.

-- 
The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

"Until next time..."
Captain Commando
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