Google’s Herculean task

Here’s an interesting article from the San Francisco Gate about how Google has so far undertaken their Herculean digitization task. According to the article, at the rate they’re going at the University of Michigan, it will take approximately 19 years to do all 7 million books in the collection (and at $10 a book will cost $70 million). Let’s hope Google can either devise quicker and cheaper ways of scanning pages and doing OCR or perhaps use some selection criteria in deciding what really should be digitized. Yikes!