[WEB4LIB] More on Google digitization and Europe

[Lars Aronsson]

Bernie Sloan quoted Deutsche Welle:

> "Nineteen European national libraries have joined forces against 
> a planned communications revolution by Internet search giant 
> Google to create a global virtual library, organizers said

If the plans for Google Print, as described in the press release, 
are indeed perceived as a "communications revolution", then I must 
congratulate the marketing and publicity people at Google.  Maybe 
we were impressed by the engineers at Google, but the marketing 
side of that firm surely is not lagging behind.

What the press release (in December) said is that ten years from 
now, Google Print is going to have 15 million volumes digitized.  
I believe so too, but predicting anything ten years into the 
future is science fiction.  Just think where we were ten years 
ago, and try even to predict the dotcom crash.  Google, founded in 
1998, hasn't been around for ten years yet.

Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) was indeed around ten years ago, 
and has a track record of doubling their collection every year.  
They now have 15,000 books online, so ten years from now they 
could have 15 million books, since 2 to the power of 10 is 1024.  
Google Print needs only to copy and index them.  Any problems with 
Project Gutenberg's textual quality so far, need only be a problem 
in the oldest 15,000 e-books out of 15 million.

My own Project Runeberg (runeberg.org) was also around ten years 
ago.  Its growth has been less continuous than that of PG, but we 
currently have some 800 volumes of classic Scandinavian literature 
online and are now doubling annually.  Doing this entirely on a 
volunteer basis, we are leaving the current digitization efforts 
of the national libraries in Denmark, Finland and Sweden (as 
mentioned among the 19 in the Deutsche Welle article) far behind.  
This could change in the course of ten years, so we limit our 
predictions to a few months.  Still, why would we feel a "threat" 
from Google or anybody else?  Google is our best friend. That's 
how people find our books.

The only reason I can see for portraying Google (or anything 
American) as a threat is that it appears to be a working solution 
for attracting funding from the European Union.  Our national 
libraries are far better at this than they are on digitization.

I couldn't find any news or announcements on this new European 
deal on www.kb.dk, www.lib.helsinki.fi or www.kb.se.  Neither at 
www.ddb.de. Bibliotheque nationale de France has a collection of 
articles at http://www.bnf.fr/pages/dernmin/com_google.htm but 
nothing is mentioned about the 19 country coallition.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/