Making Books Digital
The Average Joe, one of my favourite blogs from Wiley editor Joe Wikert, has a post on Amazon and Google's efforts to digitise as many books as they can, so as to allow ever more flexible ways for people to trip over books that are relevant to whatever information they're searching for. Joe's post is sparked by a recent BusinessWeek article.
To my mind, this can only be a good thing - these digitisation initiatives offer the very real prospect of books being brought back into the online information loop again. Currently, most people turn to the Net first to research stuff, and miss out on the huge amounts of carefully prepared info in books because those books are not part of the digital network. Let searchers know that x, y, z books also hold information on the topics they require, and a lot more books get sold if people can read for themselves that the book has the pertinent information they require. There's obviously a huge commercial motive here, but there's also a massive knowledge incentive here - to effective make the Net a centralised database of knowledge. Heady, utopian stuff.
More on digitising books:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
