Karl Eichwalder writes:
Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org> writes:
Vint Cerf, known as the creator of the Internet said, [...] The result is that Project Gutenberg and its fellow supporters of The World eBook Fair have added more books for The Second World eBook Fair in the just about two months since the first of the World eBook Fairs than Google has been able to add in the just about two years since it announced The Google Print Library in the Fall of 2004.
Do you believe your own or his statements? With every new day I find new books in PDF format with Google Book Search, books not available somewhere else.
I personally find Michael Hart's counts of his World eBook Fair to be quite inflated, counting many Project Gutenberg books two or three times. I have personally located over 110,000 full view books at Google Books (I'm sure there's many more, but they locked down my domain a month ago to require CAPTCHA responses every 30 minutes or so, and I've been working on other things). Some of these books are duplicates also, where Google scanned two different copies of the same book. About 6-8 months ago, I ran a search that seemed to max out at about 50,000 books, so it's quite possible that Google is now scanning about 10,000 public domain books a month, which is far more impressive (and more valuable to the public domain) than finding a few more public domain archives and converting their contents to PDF (sorry Michael). On the plus side, Google now makes PDFs of most of the full view books with high resolution images and often has links to Open WorldCat. On the down side, they still seem to be skipping illustrations that don't have page numbers, and often lose a page or two around the illustrations. The PDFs are images only, so they're not really usable in low resolution devices like PDAs and cell phones. I'm still hoping to hear big things from the Open Content Alliance, but I haven't heard a word from them since their opening press releases. At that time, they were planning big things for October 2006, but I don't know if that's still their timeline.