Just how many books are there in the world?
You would think that it would be impossible to count every single book in the world right? There must be a billion books that have been written over all of the ages. So you would think it would be impossible and if someone tried to do it, they would be an idiot. Well, obviously someone thought it was possible because someone is doing that. That someone is Google. They are not going to count scientists “work” because there will be thousands of those. But Google will count everything else.
They were originally going to start with all of the books with an ISBN but there are hundreds of books that have the same ISBN so they cannot count on that. And they also have to eliminate everything else with an ISBN. This was said on Google’s blog about what they have to eliminate….
“We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke), and other items for which we receive catalog entries.”
-Written by Leonid Taycher, software engineer
If you want to read the full article about this feat they are trying to do click here.
Right now they have counted 129,864,880. But that number will only last until Sunday, August 8th.
Then they get back to counting.
Hmmmmmm. I wonder what number will be the end result.
At least now I know what a lot of Google’s staff will be doing for a while to come.
“One million one, one million two, one million three.
Oh I think I counted those before, or didn’t I?
UHHHHHHHHHH!
One, two, three……..”
