We Have The Knowledge of The Ages at Our Fingertips

We have the knowledge of the ages at our fingertips, how bad a thing is that? - Stephen Fry on the benefits of the internet.

British Library hands 200 years of history to Google
40 million pages
By John Oates
20th June 2011

The British Library is handing 250,000 books to Google for scanning into the Google Books project.

The Library had previously partnered with Microsoft which digitised books from the 19th century and Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The Library only owned one of the notebooks - the second was from Bill Gates' own collection.

The Google slurp will see 40 million pages scanned and made available on Google's site and through the British Library. All the works are out of copyright - Google's scanning of in-copyright books has caused trouble in the past. The search giant pays the cost of scanning.

Material includes books, pamphlets and magazines from 1700 to 1870 in several European languages.

The scanned books will also be available through the Europeana site, funded by the European Commission. more