Google.... Books

Accessibility sometimes can be achieved through assistive technology, such as screen magnification or text-to-speech programs. Unfortunately, much like architects must plan on including wheelchair ramps into blueprints before any buildings are built, information must be encoded in such a way that these technologies are able to be applied. According to the World Blind Union, less than ten percent of published works are in a format accessible for blind people.

In 2004, Google partnered with the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and the New York Public library to start Google Print, the first major effort to digitize historical books and make them record-searchable from the internet. This in itself organized centuries of data into viewable, discoverable primary sources that anyone with a computer could access at home. By 2007, Google took it to the next level, and launched technology that could read the words of a scanned page and output it into a txt document – thereby making these historical texts interpretable by assistive technology for the first time in history. Text-to-speech programs can’t pick out the words from an image of an ancient page, but Google can, and this was an important bridge to build.

I’m sure I don’t have to explain the significance of books for a person’s education, and by extension their potential success or independence, to a readership of library professionals. I do think a lot of the time able-bodied people take it for granted that books are available, if we can only encourage people to look for them. Imagine though, wanting to read (or hear) books, and simply not having the content available.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of resistance to creating a monolithic digital library on the internet. There’s an excellent article on EdSurge that explains the entire saga in detail, but it boils down to issues over copyright law and profit. Maybe in the future, we’ll be able to have a central catalog of completely open-access and accessible records and copies of all the books ever written, all stored in the cloud. For now, let’s continue to support organizations like the Accessible Books Consortium, and do our best to support efforts to build infrastructure for open information.

Youtube tutorial on Using Google Books for Research