Google Books! A Bibliophile's Dream.

Source: Wired.com

What will Google think of next? They are on the road to global domination, sort of. At the very least, they have distracted me immensely today as I researched this posting and got carried away.

Yesterday, my good friend and colleague, Dr. Michael Edmond, presented an unusual case at our weekly infectious diseases case conference. During the scholarly presentation, he made reference to Ngrams and Google Books.

Google Books is an uber-search engine, which allows one to search the full text of books. Depending on the copyright status, you are able to browse full text of books on-line, and if the book is in the public domain, the book may be downloaded in PDF format. Links will allow one to borrow or buy a book.

This is truly astonishing.

A history of this digitization process is neatly summarized here. Per Google, the number of scanned books is currently at 15 million, many of which are no longer in print. The estimated world body of literary work is 130 million unique books, and Google plans to scan all of them by the end of the decade. Wow.

The literary world will be at our Google-fingertips.

I am in awe. I am inspired. I am late for work.