Saturday, December 18, 2010

130 Million Books


It is not an infinity. There are only so many books in the world. Google has come up with the magic number. It is almost 130 million.

They all need to get digitized. They all need to be made available. Out of copyright books for free. In copyright books for $10 a month, read as many as you want. The idea of buying one book at a time is quite ridiculous.

I think digitizing all past books and eat all you want business models will speed up the rate at which books get written by humanity. We will have many more authors writing many, many more books. And that's a good thing.

Social media content is great. But the treasures of humanity lie in those books. Go get 'em, tiger.
Inside Google Books: Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you.: Our definition is very close to what ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) are supposed to represent, so why can’t we just count those? First, ISBNs (and their SBN precursors) have been around only since the mid 1960s, and were not widely adopted until the early-to-mid seventies. They also remain a mostly western phenomenon. So most books printed earlier, and those not intended for commercial distribution or printed in other regions of the world, have never been assigned an ISBN.
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