a.k.a. the perks of having a large, well-funded PR department.
The New Yorker: Google’s Moon Shot – The Quest For The Universal Library
Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com.
… Google“s is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitized hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: to organize the world“s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Anyone heard of Project Gutenberg, the oldest producer of free eBooks on the internet, 20,000 at last count? Scanning books, even destructively, is not a big deal, but proofreading them and converting them to universally-readable plain-vanilla ASCII text is. Why do Google et al. think Distributed Proofreaders even exists? Scanned images are not eBooks. The concept of a universal library sounds lofty, but its purpose must be utilitarianism and not amassment for its own sake.
So, what is wrong with the mainstream press that they refuse to acknowledge, much less highlight, the longstanding eBook project that is Project Gutenberg, along with its scanning and proofreading efforts? Founder Michael Hart’s answer is double-pronged, “There’s a fairly well-known saying attributed to Gandhi, and often used by activists battling injustice: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.'” Then he said, “We don’t have a PR dept . . . hint, hint. . .”
Tonight, as I lay me down to sleep, prayers will be dispatched for two extra arms and four hours added to each day.
