Google’s Tally Of World’s Book Titles: 129,864,880
How many different books are there in the world? It’s a question Jon Orwant often hears. He’s an engineering manager at Google Books — part of the tech company’s efforts to digitize all of the world’s books. Recently, they announced an answer: 129,864,880. Melissa Block talks to Orwant about how Google came up with the number.
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MELISSA BLOCK, host: You may not have devoted your waking hours to wondering exactly how many books have been published, but Google has. In fact, they’re trying to count as part of a mission to index and digitize all of them.
So far, Google says, our planet has produced 129,864,880 books – at least that was the number as of last week. Jon Orwant is engineering manager at Google Books. So Jon, that was the number last week. What about now?
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