September 23, 2009

Ga-ga for Google Books

One of the most important events of the Information Age will be taking shape in the coming months. In October 2004, Google premiered its latest search engine at a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany. Then called Google print, the service allowed users to browse books that had been scanned into an electronic library using optical character recognition. The service is now called Google Books and has scanned over 7 million books into their library; certainly an impressive feat considering that only ~32 million books have been published in human history. Furthermore, after reaching a settlement with the Author's Guild and the publishing industry over copyright issues, Google is poised to greatly expand the fraction of their library that is available for preview and purchase.

Although some folks are still concerned about the terms of the settlement (privacy and antitrust issues, see the ASJA link below), it looks likely that the online availability of published material is going to increase in the coming months and years. In addition to being a major milestone for humanity, this service has been a tremendous help in researching my Hopeless Journey. When I search their database on a particular composer or composition, the volume of useful information that I can obtain from Google Books far exceeds that I can get from an ordinary Google search. Even for those books with limited previews, I need only browse a couple of paragraphs of the section that matched my search terms in order to obtain the information I'm looking for.

There is no doubt that Google Books will contribute a great deal to this blog. I'm old enough to remember what life was like before the internet... I have to say, this is a truly exciting time to be alive.

Related Links: Google Books, NYTimes article, Opposition from ASJA
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2 comments:

  1. It is possible that the endless availability of information will destroy us, or at least me. Constraints are key to the creative process.
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  2. Good point... they do say that necessity is the mother of invention. However, I think the history of human civilization would suggest that the more information we have, the more aware we are of our limitations. This certainly parallels what I see with the development of music. Real progress is made when different musical movements discover one another -- composers are driven to become better when they see what others have done.

    Interestingly, I'm getting very close to the period where an invention similar to Google Books, the printing press, began to see heavy use among musicians. History reports a subsequent outpouring of new musical forms and styles, but to what extent we are biased by the increase in printed source material is unclear.
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