NYT and "Scan this Book"

Blogger Stephen, from SirsiDynix, highlighted the following amazing article about books and technology:

The New York Times Magazine article from this past weekend (May 14th)is getting a lot of blog play. Phil Bradley has summarized some of the interesting stats here:

"Here are a few of the highlights:

Humans have published at least 32,000,000 books that, when digitised will fit onto a 50 petabyte hard disk. With tomorrow's technology it will all fit onto your iPod.

Nearly 100% of all contemporary recorded music has already been digitized, as has 10% of the half million movies on the IMDB.

1,000,000 books a year are being digitized, and books can be scanned at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour (by machine).

The link and tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years, allowing each book, page, paragraph, word to talk to each other.

Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

The effect of copyright law, to protect the publishers, has meant that about 75% of all books have been abandoned; out of print and unable to be copied. 15% of books are in the public domain and 10% are in print.

Value has shifted away from a copy of a book towards the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize and edit a work."

Worth a read!