On the Future of Books

Posted by James Crawford, engineering director, Google Books

This morning I’ll be speaking on the topic of the present and future of Google Books at the Europeana Open Culture conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. Now as much as ever, our shared vision of bringing all the incredible content stored in the world’s books online depends on working with libraries, publishers, authors and book lovers.

Europeana is a digital library initiated by the European Commission to bring together digitization projects from around the continent. Europeana works with European libraries, archives, and museums to collect and make easily accessible the books, music, film and art that make up Europe’s cultural heritage. It is an important project, and it shows that around the world, public and private bodies see the value of digitization in order to provide broad access to our shared cultural heritage.

To date, working with library and publisher partners around the world, we have scanned more than 15 million books from more than 100 countries in over 400 languages as part of the Google Books project we started in 2004. The greater the diversity of content on the web, the more useful it becomes. And the more people who can access the information cataloged in books, the more enlightening those works become.

Check back soon for highlights from the conference.