The present and future of google books

Abstract

The Google Books project has the modest goal of scanning all of the world’s books, converting them to digital form, and making them searchable and accessible. To date over twelve million books, containing over four billion pages, have been scanned and digitized. This is an impressive number but it turns out that scanning is only the beginning of the challenge. One part of the challenge in making books searchable and accessible is that a scan produces an image of a page, and often a blurred or partially obscured one at that, but searching requires a digital representation of the text on the page. Converting the image to text is also critical to creating a good reading experience since the text can then be reformatted to match the display size and the user can control the font size and layout. This is especially important for tablet devices and smart phones.