
A tale of 10,000,000 books - fogus
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/tale-of-10000000-books.html
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tseabrooks
I think the Google Book initiative is great. I'm no conspiracy theorist but It
seems the biggest problem with this type of service is verifiability. If
Google has digitally transcribed some very rare work that is later destroyed
it will be hard to trust Google's digital copy of the work for real accuracy
when we have no other copy to compare against. Someone could create a mirror
but that does no good if the mirror is created after the digital copy has been
tampered with. I think Google needs to work on adding something to increase
the trustworthiness of the works they store. Maybe it is a publicly released
checksum of the works that is created when they are scanned and stored by a
separate entity or maybe there is some other very clever method. I just know
that I would be hesitant to take a single corporate entities word on the
veracity of their copy of a public document.

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Kadin
Also see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870663>

(That is the same piece, but from the NYT Op-Ed page. The Google Blog is
probably better from the perspective of having a permanent, non-paywalled
link, which in itself is an interesting commentary on new/old media...)

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Tichy
Ok, I get it: Google is digitizing a lot of books.

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elblanco
Books you say?

