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December 15, 2004
Content is King
Flush with cash from it's skyrocketing stock price, Google is betting big on something that most bloggers, radio stations, and television broadcasters have known. It can be just as profitable to give your valuable digital content away for free, and attract such a large audience that you can sell enough advertising to eclipse what you might get by charging a fee to access it. If only newspapers, online classifieds, or personals web sites would learn the same lesson.
Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, announced an agreement yesterday with Oxford University and some of the leading U.S. research libraries to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties.
The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.
Democracy and Information
Google, newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer, has agreed to underwrite the projects announced yesterday while also adding its own technical capabilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands a pages a day at each library.Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at US$10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict that the project could take at least a decade.
Posted by Mike at December 15, 2004 09:22 PM
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