In 2008, Apple deity Steve Jobs damned the Amazon Kindle to the technological abyss by asserting on eBook readers, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” Fast-foward to 2010 and chuckle with glee as you watch his holiness make a u-turn the circumference of John Prescott as the iPad comes out, brimming with eBook reader features and plans to release books on the Apple app store. Jobs has, albeit unintentionally, shown us that one of the oldest forms of communication simply won’t die.

For around six years now, Google have been feverishly cataloguing books faster than a hyperactive librarian, meticulously scanning page after page and applying character recognition to create a vast database of books and their content. The aim of this process is to establish a new facet of their search engine, returning book titles and relevant passages for queries alongside the website results; although amount of content that you’ll get to see from results is yet undetermined, as Google are, as you’d expect, being put through the motions of copyright issues. The overarching concept is that, rather than searching to find websites with the information you need, or having to face the daring feat of going to your local library for books on the subject, you can get information the credibility of a book without having to decipher the cryptic systems of organisation in libraries. Since the inception of the internet and the unfiltered information therein, there’s always been a choice between getting potentially inaccurate information fast and getting verified information slowly that Google hopes to tackle.

This concept is not unlike Wikipedia, which gets a lot of bad press and is, for many educators, a taboo website – owing mostly to the claim that it’s unreliable due to its freely editable nature. However, Wikipedia is, arguably, the best possible source of information, as it is far more moderated than any other website out there – while it’s extremely easy for someone to make a website claiming that Bruce Forsyth is a robot spy whose speech synthesiser malfunctions whenever he says “it’s nice to see you”, but put that information on Wikipedia and it will be set upon by an army of editors who will pick apart this new addition, demand sources and, eventually, remove it. Getting a book published is another, pardon the pun, story, however, as a manuscript, research and information is subject to detailed editing, proof reading and review before a publisher sinks it’s cash into bringing it to paper and print. Non-fiction, therefore, and in particular publications of a scientific or otherwise factual nature is heavily moderated and its content is, again arguably, of greater veracity. Though Wikipedia has far more stringent editing procedure than the rest of the internet, it is no match for the experience and history of editing that publications carry.

Wikipedia is a favourite for students for the very reason that it’s a prolific, central source of information, but every student wants to impress their lecturer by citing publications by experts in the field, and now Google’s plan to create what is essentially a Wikipedia of books, carrying the heavy verification and moderation of the latter with the convenience and centralisation of the former, solving the age old dilemma of convenience versus accuracy.