James Jacobs — the guy from diglet who had been writing to Google to try to get “find in a library” added to ALL Google Book Search results — went to see Daniel Clancy, the Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project speak at Stanford. While the talk wasn’t to librarians and wasn’t really about the social implications of the book search, James did learn a few things.
– Clancy mentioned that Google was NOT going for archival quality (indeed COULD not) in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned
– about 70% of the book project use was coming from India.
– 92% of the world’s books are not generating revenues for copyright holders or publishers
If Googl Book Search really interests you, you might also like to read The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story [pdf, today’s library link o’ the day] which discusses some of the misinformation and lawsuits surrounding the Google Library porject and comes down on the side of Google’s fair use position.