It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody...

It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.

It would have been nice to see Google partnering with the LIbrary of Congress for this sort of project. Google owns and maintains the database but with public protections for the works involved. Republicans love privatizing, after all, and Democrats just love getting the word out there.

Originally shared by Ade Oshineye

"""Google was the only one with the initiative, and the money, to make it happen. “If you want to look at this in a raw way,” Allan Adler, in-house counsel for the publishers, said to me, “a deep pocketed, private corporate actor was going to foot the bill for something that everyone wanted to see.” """

History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme.


https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/