Sunday, March 25, 2007

The future of books | Not bound by anything | Economist.com

The Economist on the future of books 

Google will not divulge exact numbers, but Daniel Clancy, the project's lead engineer, gives enough guidance for an educated guess: Google's contract with one university library, Berkeley's, stipulates that it must digitise 3,000 books a day. The minimum for the other 12 universities involved may be lower, but the rate for participating publishers is higher. So a conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year. The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.

Source: The future of books | Not bound by anything | Economist.com

1 comment:

Richard Schwartz said...

Hmmm... if that figure is right, the Berkeley contract requires digitizing more than 400 pages per minute, round the clock. Even with a plentiful cheap student labor supply, that's an awful lot.