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Okay, everything printed is going to be on the Net.
Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
Google, the operator of the world’s most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.
...Google – newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer – has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced today while also adding its own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands of pages a day at each library.
Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at $10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could take at least a decade.
...”Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today,” said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University’s head librarian.
Two decades is conservative. Amazon’s already done the same thing with a tremendous number of the books it sells. (A couple months ago I was looking page-by-page through a Henry James book trying to find a particular sentence when I realized, I could just do a search for it through that same book on Amazon. It brought it right up.)
So… every book in the world is going to be available via the Net (although probably not for free). It’s going to happen—and it’s already started.
The rate of tech advancement is getting faster than ever. Computers were around for over a decade, and just when it seemed like every killer app had been invented and things were going to get boring, we got…
The VHS-Betamax format war for videotape format went on for years. Currently there’s a similar war brewing for the next DVD format, which will support hi-def TV.
Both “Blu-ray”, principally backed by Sony, and “HD DVD”, which has been developed by Toshiba, are based on the same basic technology.
But there’s no time anymore for something like this to take years to play out in the marketplace, because by that time the next advance in formats is likely to be on the way, or perhaps already here.
And with the DVD market unlikely to support parallel formats, the loser faces the prospect of squandering millions spent on research, development and marketing costs.
So if you’re enjoying all the new stuff that’s arriving, then, in the prophetic words of a former era, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
