The revolution will be digitized

Folks who know me know I'm not much for predictions taking the form 'x is a revolutionary event'. Side-effect, I suspect, of growing up in the PR-saturated world in which three blades instead of two on the disposable plastic razor is heralded in breathless terms by the anonymous commercial voiceover guy as a breakthrough of epochal importance. Yeah, yeah, revolutionary, whatever.

That said, okay, this probably does actually qualify as quite the thing, and I'm not just saying so 'cos the guy quoted might be a distant relative:

Google has reached agreements with five of the world’s most celebrated libraries, including Oxford University’s Bodleian, to digitise more than 15 million books and make them freely accessible on the internet, a project that will take six years...

...Ronald Milne, the Bodleian’s acting head librarian, said that in terms of disseminating information, the development was as seminal an event as the invention of the printing press.

“It’s a revolution,” Mr Milne said. Referring to the Bodleian’s own copy of Johann Gutenberg’s Bible, the first real book to be produced using the technique of printing from moveable type which Gutenberg invented in the 1450s, Mr Milne added: “In terms of what Gutenberg’s invention was all about, enabling books to be disseminated cheaply, it is very much comparable to that.”

-- World's leading libraries agree to put books online, The Times Online

A cool thing, to be sure. Though I'm beginning to fear with half-decent libraries available in the browser, I might lose even the 20 minutes remaining of each day I'm not online reading.