4 ms·
The tragedy is that Google is tasked with this at all. It would be cool if public libraries could work together on a massive public digital library. This should
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
The tragedy is that Google is tasked with this at all. It would be cool if public libraries could work together on a massive public digital library. This shouldn't be Google's responsibility.
- Jtsummers 2y agoGoogle wasn't tasked (by a third party) with this, they chose to do it.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoarguably Google was invented to fund this project. The books project predates the search engine and the search engine grew out of the project of creating a universal digital library. The PageRank algorithm is one of a class of algorithms used to score citations in books and papers.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoAll humans everywhere have a responsibility to preserve culture and knowledge to the best of their ability. I think what you meant to say is that none of us can trust Google with this important task.
- renewiltord 2y agoOne of the great tragedies of civilization is that we leave things in the hands of those who do them rather than in the hands of those who tell us about our responsibility to do them.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoI personally do what I can. I've been trying to find old phone books and catalogs at garage sales, scanning them when I can get them. I teach my children that this is a responsibility of theirs. But if you're offering me even a fraction of Google's budget, I think I might manage to scale things up.
- renewiltord 2y agoPerhaps a second tragedy is that we give money to those who provide us with something. A better world might be where we give Google’s money to people so that they can teach children to buy phone books at garage sales. In this way, civilization may prosper.
- Apocryphon 2y agoA simple search for "phone books" on Google Books yields no actual phone books, so the poster is objectively doing a better job than Google on that front.
- dredmorbius 2y agoHathiTrust was ... nearly this. Until it too was emasculated. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust> Otherwise, we have Project Gutenberg (public domain), OpenLibrary (Internet Archive, both PD and copyrighted works), ZLibrary, Library Genesis, and Anna's Archive.