14 DAY TRIAL // Google has marked a rather important milestone in its quest to digitize the world's books and make them available to everyone. The company announced that it had finished scanning one million books from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) university libraries. CIC is an organization made up of several big universities in the US.
Google has been working to make digital copies of every book in the world. It has partnered with publishers, libraries and, indeed, universities for this.
Google has scanned millions of books so far, despite quite a few setbacks down the road.
"Today we're celebrating an important milestone: Google has digitized one million books from member libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)," Kim Armstrong, deputy director of Center for Library Initiatives for the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, announced.
"The CIC is the consortium of the Big Ten member universities and the University of Chicago," she added.
"Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. Once digitized, the books are shipped back to our originating libraries to resume their journeys from bookshelves to backpacks," she explained.
This first step is part of a more ambitious partnership between Google and CIC. The work is far from done though, in total, the two parties want to scan some 10 million books from the university libraries, from a total of close to 85 million.
The scanned books are now available in Google Books, but all of the universities have received copies of the digitized versions as well and some are making them available on their own.
To date Google has managed to scan over 15 million books which are now available in Google Books, though not all in full. Some books, still under copyright are only searchable withing Books and the Google search engine itself, but aren't available for viewing in full at Google.