Future of Books
Kevin Kelly has an excellent article (registration required) in the New York Times about the efforts to scan all the world’s estimated 25 million books. The current rate is estimated at 1 millions books scanned each year. One company in China claims to have scanned 50% of all books published in China since 1949. Of course he discusses Googles scanning efforts and the issues raised by the project. He also discusses Amazon’s efforts, automated machines that scan 1,000 pages an hour, and China and India’s scanning factories. It is estimated that the USA 15% of the books are in the public domain, 10% are currently in print, with the remaining 75% are out of print but still copyrighted. For a long time a copyright protected a book for 14 years after publication. Now in the USA a copyright protects a book for 70 years after the author’s death. One result if this long copyright is that most of the books that fall out of print will vanish. The book will still be covered by copyright but it will be impossible to find anyone that owns the copyright.
Of course the interesting thing is when these millions of scanned books become available on-line. Already libraries can purchase scanned books at about 50 cents per book. The SDSU library contains about 1.2 millions books and bound periodicals. What will happen when students have 1 million books on their laptop or iPod?
Thursday, May 18, 2006
