The Economist runs an
interesting story according to which Google is scanning the staggering number of 27'000 books on average per day:
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Google will not divulge exact numbers, but Daniel Clancy, the project's lead engineer, gives enough guidance for an educated guess: Google's contract with one university library, Berkeley's, stipulates that it must digitise 3,000 books a day. The minimum for the other 12 universities involved may be lower, but the rate for participating publishers is higher. So a conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year. The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.
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With the immense amount of digitized books, the author contemplates how people will read the book in the future.
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As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology “unbind” books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?
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At the end of the day, he doesn't believe that e-books will replace print books, but that, like paperbacks and audiobooks, they are a form that is here to stay.