Scan This Book! - New York Times

Link: Scan This Book! - New York Times. There's an excellent article in the NYT about the future of the book, that is well worth reading. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Humans have published at least 32,000,000 books that, when digitised will fit onto a 50 petabyte hard disk. With tomorrows technology it will all fit onto your iPod.
• Nearly 100% of all contemporary recorded music has already been digitized, as has 10% of the half million movies on the IMDB.
• 1,000,000 books a year are being digitized, and books can be scanned at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour (by machine).
• The link and tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years, allowing each book, page, paragraph, word to talk to each other.
• Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.
• The effect of copyright law, to protect the publishers, has meant that about 75% of all books have been abandoned; out of print and unable to be copied. 15% of books are in the public domain and 10% are in print.
• Value has shifted away from a copy of a book towards the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize and edit a work.

There's lots of thoughtful stuff in the article, and it's a must read.

Comments

[Julio ANjos]

The Portuguese National Library has 800.000 unique titles in catalog, and we're one of the least prolific literary producers in the world.

Right next door the national library of Spain states they have nearly 5.000.000 books. The British Library claims over 9.000.000. I'm a half of 32.000.000 books and I've not started to count france (13 million printed documents but I can't find how may are magazines and how many are books), germany (22,201,549 physical items), brasil, china, india, australia, japan, etc. I can accept some percentage of all diferent titles in diferent languages in diferent countries in the whole world are translations of each other but, even then, I can't find numbers of national bibliographies where I can come out with 32 million unique books in the whole world! What were the sources to arrive at this number?

PS: I choose not to believe KEVIN KELLY took the USA's OCLC catalog for a catalog of all the libraries in the world, did he?