Google And the Myth of Universal Knowledge – Jean-Noel Jeanneney

Posted by Shaun on September 8th, 2008 filed in Books
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I read through “Google And the Myth of Universal Knowledge” by Jean-Noel Jeanneney the other week. It’s a very short book written in French, but translated into English. I didn’t purposefully go to the library to get this one; it just caught my eye on the way to the checkout and seeing as it is about 90 pages long I figured I could get through it in no time.

The book is a response to the Google’s Book Search project. As an important figure in the French library system I can see why the author feels so strongly about his feelings towards the project, but after reading the book it was clear that he had conflicting feelings. Throughout the book he puts up an argument against the project, yet near the end he says that he is not against the project, only the unregulated methods that Google is employing.

In the end I agree that there should be more effort put into coming up with an acceptable and comprehensive standard for digitizing and categorizing books, I just don’t think that Google is wrong in starting its project. Somebody has to make the first move and seeing as scanners and OCR software has been around for years it seems to me that if Google didn’t make the first move then nobody was.

Sound familiar? Google is doing the same thing with Chrome. They felt there was a need and they made the first move towards their goal. This is igniting a bit of a fire to get other projects to move towards the same goal.

If you’re interested in books, preservation and searching of books then this book is a good read. It gives a European’s look at Google, which is seen (accurately so) as almost a solely American company.