<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[The Dish]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://dish.andrewsullivan.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Andrew Sullivan]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://dish.andrewsullivan.com/author/sullydish/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[How Many Book Titles Are In The&nbsp;World?]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[
<p><em><span style="font-size: 12px;">by Patrick Appel</span></em> </p>
<p>168,178,719 as of last Friday <a href="http://www.samefacts.com/archives/intellectual_property_/2009/09/168178719.php">according</a> to Google Books. Geoffrey Nunberg <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/">is worried</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google&#39;s book search is clearly on track to becoming the world&#39;s largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google&#39;s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it&#39;s safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google&#39;s servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.</p>
<p>That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?</p>
</blockquote>
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