on books and fingers

Image from DesignObserver

Recently, Design Observer ran a piece about Google Books, entitled Why Is Google Giving Us the Finger?. While there has been a lot of discussion—and a whole lawsuit—around the Google Books project, there has been very little said about the realities of it, including how the books are to be scanned and entered into the database. Having worked on the publishing side, I know that Google is far slower than Amazon or other sites at scanning and uploading digital versions of new books, and I imagine performing these processes on older books is a far more difficult process. (You can't just send Google a PDF of a book that's been out of print for a few decades.)

If nothing else, the article is worth reading for this gem:

I was surprised that Google didn’t make use of a higher class of scanner. And I was really surprised by what happened next: like a dirty photo falling from between the pages of a book, a photograph popped up.
It showed the hand of whoever fed pages into the scanner — a hand with a latex sheath on its index finger, like a condom. The person’s nails were nothing to brag about. The condom and the nails, combined with the sudden, unexpected appearance, made the picture seem obscene and unhealthy. I thought with horror of the guy who found a finger in his bowl of fast-food chili.

This is the feeling of humanity—or, perhaps more correctly, human error—creeping in on what we consider to be a soulless, animatronic process. Unless you are familiar with the process of scanning books, or unless you have worked in a library, or unless you understand the Google Book project, you would of course be shocked to see this fragment of behind-the-scenes action in what could be considered an end product. Personally, I love finding these surprises in projects—it shows that there was thought and care put into the project, which makes it feel more real to me. But maybe I'm just more of a humanist than most.