Info Pioneer

H ow many books have ever been published in all of modern history? According to Google’s advanced algorithms, the answer is nearly 130 million books, or 129,864,880, to be exact. We’ll admit it’s practically impossible to count every book that has ever been written, but in order for Google Books to successfully catalog the world’s supply of printed knowledge, the company needs an estimate of the amount of books it needs to scan. That’s why Google set out on the task to do just that. In a detailed blog post , software engineer Leonid Taycher outlined just how complex counting books actually can become. The first step is defining exactly what a book is. The company decided to discount anything that wasn’t an idealized bound volume: “One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a ‘tome,’ an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies (e.g. a particular edition of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown) or can exist in just one or two copi...