Old Books Joining the Digital World...By the Thousands

Google is leading the charge towards a world where every piece of information ever put down on paper can be stored and accessed digitally. Other companies are contributing, too--Adobe the most notable--but Google is at the forefront of this stuff.

And may stand to reap the most benefit (i.e. profit) when all is said and done.

So far, Google Books has scanned and rendered digital many thousands of pre-1923 books, and many hundreds printed after that (1923 is the copyright expiration area).

Once that content is in digital form, interesting sales and advertising possibilities arise. Indeed, a visit to Google Books shows this notion in action already: if you're reading a book about business, you're going to see ads for books about business on either side of that page.

Google's efforts in the Optical Character Recognition field are a key part of this strategy. Document imaging technology makes the first step possible: books are being scanned into digital format, and from there they become, almost, other things.

That transformation begins with document imaging, but certainly doesn't end with it. Now, all books, even the forgotten ones, appear destined to live forever...