Review: Google Books

Abstract

Google Books ; http://books.google.com For the last ten years or so internet search engines, and Google in particular, have made the retrieval of digital information increasingly and surprisingly fast, reliable, and efficient. Google searches have already changed the way we live and work. And our expectations of a permanent, seamless access to all kinds of searchable data have grown accordingly, in quantity and quality. Google itself is constantly expanding the power and scope of its searches into new and sometimes unexpected domains. Given the pace of this ongoing revolution in global data processing, scholars and historians may be reasonably puzzled by the persistent opacity of most of the predigital accumulated lore of humankind, in print and in manuscript form. Why should the full content of all the books (and codices) in the world not be made as easily searchable as today's World Wide Web? There are various reasons for that: technical, first of all, but also legal and cultural. All digital objects, regardless of how they manifest themselves to human senses, are recorded and transmitted as sequences of numbers, or digits. In the case of alphabetical texts, the 30-something letters of Western (and non-Western) alphabets and the 10 Hindu-Arabic numerals are first converted into a three-digit code (ASCII or one of its followers); this code is then translated into a binary notation (a series of zeroes and ones). Unlike humans, computers can easily search huge digital files looking for a precise sequence, or string, of zeroes and ones, thus retrieving all occurrences of the same words or numbers in a given data field. In order to become digitally searchable, the content of printed books or manuscripts must first be digitized——converted into a sequence of numbers. This used to be done manually (by typing texts into a word processor, for example), but is now more …