Encyclopedia Googlactica: Google Puts All Human Knowledge Online
Finally. After many years of reading about the universal dictionary (Robert Heinlein), the city fathers (James Blish), the house records (Frank Herbert), and the hitchhiker's guide (Douglas Adams), to name just a few, Google has finally decided to put all there is of human knowledge online.
All right, not quite all of it. But Google is working with the University of Michigan, Harvard and several other libraries to put millions (that's millions!) of books online. Scanned, spidered, and ready to read. Google has already started scanning some books; full details on what the program will entail are not yet available. Let's face it; given their past history with new programs, Google will probably still have this in beta with a couple million books scanned.
Google print lets you look at whole pages for free books and excerpts from copyrighted works. Revenue possibilities exist for ads delivered with content, buy-this-book links, and so forth. But I'm hoping that most of it will be free for the taking.
Read more at Google Print.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction.)
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