Internet resources: Google to add 130 million titles to Google Books

Google Books developers are planning to add around 130 million titles (estimated number of prints in the world) to the service’s catalogue, which indexes data on books in shops and libraries, and also publishes rare edition on Internet, reads Google’s official blog.

In order to create its own eBook catalogue, Google had to study some other catalogues. Among the sources were ISBN (International Standard Book Numbers), the Library of Congress and others.

“When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: “Just how many books are out there?”

Current catalogues, according to Google representatives, have drawbacks and can’t give a reliable answer to the question on a definite number of issued books. Thus, ISBNs have been around only since the mid 1960s and remain a mostly western phenomenon. So most book printed earlier have never been assigned an ISBN. What is more, ISBNs are also often assigned to things other than books. Even though they are intended to represent “books and book-like products,” unique ISBNs have been assigned to anything from CDs to bookmarks to T-shirts.

Majority of libraries rather than identifying books, identify records that describe bibliographic entities, considering all editions of one book as one unit. For instance, a monographic series with thousands of volumes is assigned a single OCLC number (Library of Congress).

Thus, Google should collect metadata from many providers and further analyze acquired records, and develop more elaborate filtration algorithm of received data array in order to reduce the level of duplication and incorrect records.

Google has currently counted 129,865 million books. However it promises that this figure will become more precise.