This week Google and the British Library have announced that they will be working together to digitise 250,000 books from the out-of-copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. Bringing a staggering 40 million pages to the digital world via both Google Books and the British Library’s website.
Google already has similar arrangements with some 40 other libraries around the world and will be looking to provide the new digitised books in a variety of languages, focusing on items that have never been available online before.
The British Library explains that this period in history “saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery,”
With a catalog of more than 14 million books, the British Library’s collection is one of the biggest in the world and it is hoped that The British Library’s digital collection of books will expand from 1.25m items to 50m by 2020.
Source : Business Insider
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