How many books exist in the world? Roughly 168,178,719, according to Google’s metadata team that works on “trying to correctly amalgamate information about all the books in the world.”
In early September, Jon Orwant, the manager of the Google Books metadata team, visited Language Log–giving a candid look at the awesome task of cataloging millions of books. In a long, heartfelt post, he outlined their problems and calculations, leaving email addresses for the leaders of his group so the conversation could continue. It was a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Google’s massive digital library.
Here’s more from Orwant’s comment: “First, we know we have problems. Oh lordy we have problems. Geoff refers to us having hundreds of thousands of errors. I wish it were so. We have millions. We have collected over a trillion individual metadata fields; when we use our computing grid to shake them around and decide which books exist in the world, we make billions of decisions and commit millions of mistakes. Some of them are eminently avoidable; others persist because we are at the mercy of the data available to us.” (Via Book Bench)