Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Google Livros" in Portuguese language version.
Google made instant e-book believers out of skeptics even though 10 years of e-book evangelism among librarians had barely made progress.
Google, one of the pioneers in this domain on the other hand, claims to have seven million books available for its "Google Book Search" project, which saw the light of day at the end of 2004.
As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago.
When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected.... From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages.
Google, on its own, is digitizing books at the Library of Congress, which has its hands full with other items.... In its quest to scan every one of the tens of millions of books ever published, Google has already digitized one million volumes. Google refuses to say how much it has spent on the venture so far, but outside experts estimate the figure at at least US$5 million. The company has also been scanning and indexing academic journals to make them searchable, and is working with the Patent Office to digitize thousands of patents dating back to 1790.
Microsoft said it had digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles.
Today, that project is known as Google Book Search and, aided by a recent class-action settlement, it promises to transform the way information is collected: who controls the most books; who gets access to those books; how access will be sold and attained.
The settlement may give new life to copyrighted out-of-print books in a digital form and allow writers to make money from titles that had been out of commercial circulation for years. Of the seven million books Google has scanned so far, about five million are in this category.
Of the seven million books Google has scanned, one million are in full preview mode as part of formal publisher agreements. Another one million are public domain works.
Microsoft launched an online library in a move that pits the world's biggest software company against Google's controversial project to digitize the world's books.
Google made instant e-book believers out of skeptics even though 10 years of e-book evangelism among librarians had barely made progress.
