On October 9, 2009 an Op-Ed article, A LIBRARY TO LAST FOREVER, by Sergey Brin, Co-Founder and President, Technology of Google Inc. was published in the New York Times.in which he discusses Google’s rationale for their book project. For the informaation I am including in this post the two final paragraphs of his article, a link to the article itself, and some randomly selected comments in response to his article. Accoring to Mr. Brin: “Google’s books project is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, but the real winners are readers, who will have access to an expanded world of books” Others are not so sure.
FINAL TWO PARAGRAPHS:
“In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.