Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Tragedy of Google Books
In August 2010, Google put out a blog post announcing that there were 129,864,880 books in the world.That number actually sounds surprisingly low. In contrast, I wonder how many the underground "bookz" scene have scanned so far. It's hard to find exact numbers, but from what I could find, LibGen contains approximately 3M books, so if Google is accurate, that's ~2.3% of all books ever published. No doubt there are other sites I'm unaware of, probably in other languages, which have also accumulated massive collections of ebooks; but the fact that there exist people who have, for free and on their own time and at risk of being sued for copyright infringement, voluntarily scanned and shared over 2.3% of all the world's books is somewhat amazing.