Quantity Over Quality at Google Book Search

Surprisingly, the scanning process involves humans, as you can see in some books from Google's index (TechCrunch, Google Blogoscoped, George Hernandez, The Genealogue spotted fingers). "If you go into Google [Book Search] and look at any book, you'll be able to see by the number of body parts and fingerprints that [the pages] are being turned manually," suggests Linda Becker, VP at Kirtas, the company that produces the fastest robotic book scanner in the world: APT BookScan 2400. "If you were to go to the Google site, you'd see that one out of every five pages is either missing, or has fingers in it, or is cut off, or is blurry."

Quantity Over Quality at Google Book Search

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