Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

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Digital Libraries

Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

1/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

Although Clancy won't describe the actual process or equipment being used for Book Search, he does point out that one of the reasons he was recruited by Google (from a lengthy career at NASA) was because, "One, I had a strong AI [artificial intelligence] background. Two, I had a lot of experience dealing with complex systems that had lots of mechanical components along with software components. And three, I had the ability to do things to scale-an important part of the Books project. There are a lot of software complexities [in that]," he concedes, "but also a lot of people complexities."

Parlez Vous… Telugu?

BOOK DIGITIZATION PROJECTS aren't new. Carnegie Mellon University's (PA) Universal Digital Library (UDL), which has been in the works since 2001, recently announced that it had digitized 1.5 million books, including 971,594 titles in Chinese, 49,695 in Telugu, 39,265 in Arabic, and 20,931 in Kannada (Telugu and Kannada are both languages of southern India), among other languages. That emphasis on multiple languages sets UDL apart from other book digitizing efforts. The volumes are being scanned by universities and organizations in multiple countries-the US, China, Egypt, and India-and are made available free in three formats: HTML, TIFF, and DjVu (a PDF alternative). Although the details may differ, the goal of the initiative sounds familiar to those who follow such matters: "to create a universal library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge."

There's more than that at stake, insists Kirtas' Becker. The actual scanning process isn't what's important in these projects, she points out. "People get confused between digitizing and scanning. When you scan a book, you get what you get. Digitizing is what Kirtas does. Once we scan a book, we take it through a digitizing process." That encompasses multiple steps, she maintains: segmenting the book (converting pages to black and white from color, if that's how they started out), performing background cleanup, converting type size (such as for applications for the visually impaired), changing the book size for printing purposes, and moving the digitized content into other file formats such as for online reading or PDF viewing.

"Right now," says Becker, "scanning is irrelevant. What is relevant is this: How do you create the highest quality digital file with the smallest file size that's repurposable so that you can extend the life of it?" She believes that's what the Google Book Search project is missing: a focus on quality. "If you were to go to the Google site, you'd see that one out of every five pages is either missing, or has fingers in it, or is cut off, or is blurry."

Still, avoiding at all costs the odd missing page or disembodied digit may not be a driving force behind Book Search right now. UC's Chandler notes the qualitative differences between the output produced by the three mass digitization efforts she was involved in at CDL. "The actual presentation of the book is quite different. If you look at what Google does, it's really a bitonal representation. It's as if the book were brand new, which is just to say that the page is white [and] the ink for the font is black. Whereas if you look at the Microsoft [Windows Live Book Search] presentation, it's a color image, so you get the sense of it as an artifact."