Scanning world's every book means turning many, many pages

Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

The manually scanning at up to 600 pages a day is much slower than Google's regular process.

"It's monotonous," the 24-year-old said.

Then she knit her career hopes into the work.

"But it's still something that I'm learning about how to interact with really old materials and working with digital imaging, which is relevant to art history."

The unusually tight binding on the early-16th-century polyglot Bible made it hard to expose the portions toward the book's middle as Mitchel spread each pair of pages for the scanner. Librarians believe it is the oldest Bible in the world with Arabic type.

Google, the Internet's leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it except to say it is much faster than what Mitchel is doing and it's not destructive.

"It took us quite a while to develop it so we do keep that confidential," said a library manager for Book Search, Ben Bunnell, who declined even to say where Google does the scanning.

Many libraries began digitizing books a decade ago to preserve them. Funding from Google allows the 28 libraries it's working with to cut their digitizing costs because they don't have to pay for scanning the books Google wants to include in Book Search.