History of the Digital Book Movement

Google Books was not the first project to attempt book digitization. The Library of Congress’s American Memory project, Project Gutenberg, the Million Book Project and the Universal Library, were all digital book projects that predated Google Books and inspired its creation.

Each of these projects all have the same mission, preserving culture and books through the digitization process and providing these books (for free) to people all around the world.  They want to preserve these books for future generations and make sure that forgotten volumes don’t lie in warehouses collecting dust.

Most of these projects have not reached the magnitude of Google Books and its quantity and popularity and as a result has not faced the same legal issues that Google Books have been facing. Google has developed its own technologies to not only speed up the scanning process but also to make it gentler, which is essential when scanning older volumes that can not handle to old process of scanning that would flip through the pages in high speeds.

As the ‘About Us’ section of the Million Books Project (of the InternetArchive project) states, “libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.”  The digital book project is important in preserving out past for our future and in this digital age where information can be reached from any place in the world, it is time our library are given the same access.

This is the goal of almost all book digitization projects and Google Books is no different. Google Books does differ though in its attempts to partner with different publishers to guarantee access as well as making partnerships with different countries, to help us digitize global history.