As we know the search engine giant Google is working on the digitization of the books an effort that will lead to amassing of encyclopedia of knowledge just a click away.
Latest to join in on this Google’s effort is University of Texas at Austin which will let Google scan and digitize almost 1 million of its books.
This project started in 2004 with commitment from five libraries of Universities of Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library.
It was then widely criticized as Google at that time copied the copyrighted material without the permission of writers. Google had to change the strategy were by it now will only show the summary of the copyrighted books but the public domain books can be browsed fully on the web.
Director of Google book search, Europe, Jens Redmer, said in an event that till now majority of the information is outside the bounds of net and this project will give the publishers power to let the readers full access to their books online.
While the president of the University of Texas, William Powers Jr. said,
‘We are excited to join the Google Books digitization effort, and feel it advances the mission of The University of Texas at Austin. Creating digital access to our library collections will enable a great many more scholars and members of the public to locate and use these tremendously valuable materials.’
Digitizing will let the masses access to the knowledge on a common platform and can be said to be a sort of commercial wikipedia as Google is bound to make loads of money from it in the end.
All the digitized material will be available through a new Google portal called the Google Book search and any public domain book that does not have a copyright problem will be available online for full browsing.
Via: Slipperybrick
