the zeitgeist report

Google is currently working on a project to digitize about one million books. The books will be searchable and they will have features that tie in books thematically so that users can have the experience of digitally wandering through the stacks:

The goal of Google Book Search is to make all offline books -- currently invisible to Google's eye -- searchable. This means physically scanning hundreds of millions of pages bound between the covers of an estimated 18 million books, recognizing around 430 languages and all sorts of fonts, making the results available for text searches, and replicating the traditional library browsing experience when it's all done. Daniel Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search, says he cannot comment on what the company has accomplished so far.

There are parallel projects going on, but Google doesn't want to help. I wonder if they've run out of 'do no evil' t-shirts:

Clancy says Google has developed its own scanning technology. But the company is mum about the technical details of the hardware, optical-character recognition (OCR) software, and scanning rate at their five scanning centers near cooperating library partners at Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, and New York Public Library.