Google Books Blog

libgen is far from an archive of "most" books and publications, not even close. The most recent numbers from libgen itself are 2.4 million non-fiction books and 80 million science journal articles. The Atlantic's database published in 2025 has 7.5 million books.[0] The publishing industry estimates that many books are published each year. As of 2010, Google counted over 129 million books[1]. At best an LLM like Llama will have have 20% of all books in its training set. 0. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-ope… 1. https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be…

There are a lot of books. Many are bullshit. Most are not worth (and never can be) read.[1] Going to primary sources helps, they're almost aways preferred to commentaries, though guides and maps may help. I span new material via bibliographies and citations frequently. This helps, somewhat, to burst bubbles. I'm currently curating from a listing of 25k+ law articles on a topic of interest. Availability of those (free, online) has a huge influence. Thanks to the Library of Alexandra (Sci-Hub) and LibGen. Adler's How to Read a Book is quite useful -- the synoptic approach especially.[2] Making rapid assessments of suitability is crucial. Being prepared to revisit those assessments, either way, later, also. Developing indicators of crap or possible gold help immensely. Again, see Adler. I spend considerabe time with older sources. They're often known to be wrong or inaccurate, but: * The path they reveal in development of understanding is often hugely useful. To understand the bug, it helps to know how it came to be. * The rhetorical and ideological battles to which they may have been part is usually now known, often spent. Literature -- science, technology, fiction, philosophy -- is all tremendously ideological, and being removed from the frame under which it was constructed, or being aware of it, helps immensely. * One often finds one's own crazy notions expresed there, sometimes partially, sometimes far more clearly. I've generally found that the…

Well, the settlement would have given Google a bonanza, but made things harder for others (by conceding both a key fair use point, and a budget for more litigation, to the Author's Guild). Whether that bonanza for Google would have been a net win for total books scanned is hard to tell. It doesn't have to be a company; you mentioned the government, and the nonprofit I work for (Internet Archive/archive.org) has a large book-scanning effort. It's also not that hard to do in a distributed, at-home fashion; see the following on DIY efforts and how to upload scans to archive.org: http://onthecommons.org/diy-book-scanning-takes http://blog.archive.org/2011/03/14/book-scan-wizard-software-now-suppo… Further, the total number of books that need scanning (as opposed to being born digital) is pretty close to capped, given the rise of born-digital versions and ebooks. Google itself estimated the total number of unique "printed and bound" materials recently as only 146 million: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-… Google's scanned over 15 million with no guarantee of the ability to sell them or legal victory. Other libraries have scanned hundreds of thousands more. Scanning is definitely happening faster than new print-only books are being created. Clearing up the situation with 'orphan works' would help. A victory for Google and others on the matter of fair-use scanning for indexing and excerpting…

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>the ship has sailed Certainly, but debating the spirit behind copyright or even "how to regulate AI" (a vast topic, to put it mildly) is only one possible route these lawsuits could take. I suspect that ultimately the winner is going to be business first (of course in the name of innovation), and the law second, and ethics coming last -- if Google can scan 129 million books [1] and store them without even a slap on the wrist [2], OpenAI and anyone of that size can most surely continue to do what they're doing. This lawsuit and others like it are just the drama of 'due process'. [1] https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be… [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AD0TT/

That statement of "before the demise of Google Books" seems unnecessary. The next quoted bit of "at least until Sunday" might have been an attempt to complete the joke, but should be interpreted as the number of books changing rapidly according to the (12 year old) linked article. http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-…

That's Google Book's estimate as of 2010, so there are more now: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-…

The thing is, bibliography cannot be "big data" by that definition. 12 millions items is nearly 10% of Google Books catalog. http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-…

I think the relevant announcement is at http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-do… .

Here's a link to the Google Books blog post Crunchgear links to (with many more details): http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-…