Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

[Admin]

EXCERPT

Google’s secret effort to scan every book in the world, codenamed “Project Ocean,” began in earnest in 2002 when Larry Page and Marissa Mayer sat down in the office together with a 300-page book and a metronome. Page wanted to know how long it would take to scan more than a hundred-million books, so he started with one that was lying around. Using the metronome to keep a steady pace, he and Mayer paged through the book cover-to-cover. It took them 40 minutes.

Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.” The idea was that in the future, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons. But books still lived mostly on paper. Page and his research partner, Sergey Brin, developed their popularity-contest-by-citation idea using pages from the World Wide Web.

By 2002, it seemed to Page like the time might be ripe to come back to books. With that 40-minute number in mind, he approached the University of Michigan, his alma mater and a world leader in book scanning, to find out what the state of the art in mass digitization looked like. Michigan told Page that at the current pace, digitizing their entire collection—7 million volumes—was going to take about a thousand years. Page, who’d by now given the problem some thought, replied that he thought Google could do it in six.

READ MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

 

[Burhan]

Beautiful long ass article. I spent about 30 minutes or a little less reading it. Amazing stuff. I didn't know Google has 25 million digital copies of books no one can read because of a failed agreement.

Good story bro. It was worth reading the entire article.

 

[Genie]

Beautiful long ass article. I spent about 30 minutes or a little less reading it. Amazing stuff. I didn't know Google has 25 million digital copies of books no one can read because of a failed agreement.

Good story bro. It was worth reading the entire article.

I heard about this , didn't know they did it another version not he sorry ays co-operatiosn and the government had google in a legal agreement regarding this turns put may not have been true.

 

[Burhan]

I heard about this , didn't know they did it another version not he sorry ays co-operatiosn and the government had google in a legal agreement regarding this turns put may not have been true.

Greed and fear of what Google can do once it gets the permission destroyed the opportunity of the digital world library. America is a country that will be destroyed by greed in the future. They took capitalism to its greediest heights and it is destroying every opportunity to develop something meaningful at a cheap price for everyone.

Anytime something new gets invented, people vested to keep the status quo will take you to court and prevent your invention to come onto the market.

Some of the fear was warranted considering how the scientific journals are obscenely expensive and people are denied access to new research information that way, but this case was self defeating.

 

[Genie]

Greed and fear of what Google can do once it gets the permission destroyed the opportunity of the digital world library. America is a country that will be destroyed by greed in the future. They took capitalism to its greediest heights and it is destroying every opportunity to develop something meaningful at a cheap price for everyone.

Anytime something new gets invented, people vested to keep the status quo will take you to court and prevent your invention to come onto the market.

Some of the fear was warranted considering how the scientific journals are obscenely expensive and people are denied access to new research information that way, but this case was self defeating.

Exactly self defeating is the right way to put , this project is in favour of the American people and everyone actually but NOPE! everything must be capitalised or else...

 

[Burhan]

Exactly self defeating is the right way to put , this project is in favour of the American people and everyone actually but NOPE! everything must be capitalised or else...

Money. They even have a saying about the US government: The best government money can buy. Everything is about money in America.

 

[Admin]

Beautiful long ass article. I spent about 30 minutes or a little less reading it. Amazing stuff. I didn't know Google has 25 million digital copies of books no one can read because of a failed agreement.

Good story bro. It was worth reading the entire article.

Google have been dangling this archive in front of us for years. I think it was briefly available around 2010 on their .US domain extension. When doing research you'll always come across these snippets.

 

[Burhan]

Google have been dangling this archive in front of us for years. I think it was briefly available around 2010 on their .US domain extension. When doing research you'll always come across these snippets.

Unfortunately, it will take an act of congress to make the archive available and congress won't take up the cause unless money is involved. Only 40% of the US population have a four year degree in a country of 300, 000, 000 people. Books aren't that important in society's priorities. This will wait for some social movement that demands this. Or a president who cares to come to power and invites others to work on a deal.

Good article though, I had no idea this existed or I forgot after I heard about it. Prolly back then it sounded futuristic and I thought "come on google" and moved on lol.

 

[Burhan]

The amazing part also is the invention of the technology customized to exclusively digitize these books. The expensive optics, the range-finding LIDAR(technology used for surveys), the weird math and the bending ability of the machines through optics to unfold a page etc. Damn! Dhareeraa iga soo daatay reading that lol. I love tech.

 

[Admin]

Unfortunately, it will take an act of congress to make the archive available and congress won't take up the cause unless money is involved. Only 40% of the US population have a four year degree in a country of 300, 000, 000 people. Books aren't that important in society's priorities. This will wait for some social movement that demands this. Or a president who cares to come to power and invites others to work on a deal.

Good article though, I had no idea this existed or I forgot after I heard about it. Prolly back then it sounded futuristic and I thought "come on google" and moved on lol.

Article notes people opposed in retrospect see its importance. They opposed it because Google was in charge however the project would not have been conceived in the first place if it wasn't for a curious pair and their printer. I have to sympathise with his efforts destroyed but what really irks me is that people who have done shit all were spoilers and how I hate spoilers, if only there was a court to tell them to do one. Getting a terminal in every library in the world would literally change the world. I don't know much about the technology but this is the best project I have seen in my life time. There are thousands of volumes on Somali topics in that archive and it's incredibly hard to search through the snippets and originals are usually always located outside this country. It's a great shame really.

 

[Burhan]

Article notes people opposed in retrospect see its importance. They opposed it because Google was in charge however the project would not have been conceived in the first place if it wasn't for a curious pair and their printer. I have to sympathise with his efforts destroyed but what really irks me is that people who have done shit all were spoilers and how I hate spoilers, if only there was a court to tell them to do one. Getting a terminal in every library in the world would literally change the world. I don't know much about the technology but this is the best project I have seen in my life time. There are thousands of volumes on Somali topics in that archive and it's incredibly hard to search through the snippets and originals are usually always located outside this country. It's a great shame really.

The benefits would have been tremendous with such terminal access installed in every library worldwide. Usually people figure out how they are/were wrong when it is too late and opportunities are squandered. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say right?

Poorer countries would have benefitted the most I think. Google may be looking out for its interests as a private entity always, but their interest in the best minds and technologies helped much.