Google and the World Brain Page #4

throwing the books into the street,

burning them,

while using the stacks as a pigsty.

Now, with Google, the University

of Michigan is involved

in one of the most extensive

preservation projects

in world history.

Google Books is a potent idea

on a number of dimensions.

What I like about Google Books

is the idea of not losing books,

especially books that might be

genuinely abandoned.

The idea of getting

all that stuff online

is, of course,

going to be a benefit,

so that, we have to love.

I went to Google in January 2003.

I actually made, what now I feel

quite embarrassed about,

I made a presentation to them,

telling them what they ought

to be doing.

Only to find out a few months later

that they'd actually been doing it

for a while already.

Project Ocean was the kind of

code name, development code name,

that Google were giving to what

eventually became Google Books.

So it was called Project Ocean

because it was big, I imagine.

HE CHUCKLES:

Google seemed to think

that they could do

almost a million in three years.

You could say that this mass

digitisation

is something like running

a huge machine through a library.

You take books by the shelf.

They are put in cartons, on carts.

They are loaded onto trucks.

And then, Google at this time

had three places in the country

where it was doing digitisation.

Supposedly, it didn't give

the address of where they were.

Google won't say how much

scanning all the books cost.

But there are estimates that...

well, it's somewhere between

$30 and $100 per book,

so if you multiply that times

20 million...

Google, early on,

bent over backwards to keep us

from communicating

with the other libraries.

There were three or four large ones

and each of us was told

we should not tell the others

what kind of a contract we had

and how we were working with Google.

To begin with, it had

to be kept fairly quiet.

It was probably mid 2003 when

I started to take the wraps off

in terms of this is going

to be a possibility

that we might be working with Google.

I witnessed the scale of the

operation and it was very impressive.

20 very large work stations

with very high-resolution cameras

sitting on top of a cradle

with very intense lights.

And, underneath, a lot of black

boxes, which, presumably,

contained all of Google's algorithms

that makes Google search what it is.

And they uploaded that stuff

straight to Mountain View,

straight from Oxford.

Google certainly depends on knowing

more and more and more

for their algorithm to be better

and better and better.

And this is the core of the way

economics in this space now works.

They had a specific interest

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