
The story behind Google Books: Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria (2017) - kumarharsh
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/
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kumarharsh
"It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database
containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that
scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of
the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse.
It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library
like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great
humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it
real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60
petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen
engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones
responsible for locking it up."

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kuharich
Prior comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14172791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14172791)

