Google Book Search by the Numbers
Affidavit says 12 million books digitized, $2.5 million a year spent on metadata
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 02/12/2010
An affidavit (below) from Google Book Search Engineering Director Dan Clancy accompanying various motions from Google in support of the pending Google Book Search Settlement—due for a fairness hearing in federal court on February 18—includes several statistics of interest to the library community.Amount spent: "hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, patenting and implementing cutting edge digital scanning technology..."
Number of books digitzed: more than twelve million
Number of libraries from which Google has received metadata: 48
Amount spent per year on licensing metadata: $2.5 million
Number of commercial databases from which Google licenses metadata: 21
Number of records Google has gathered and analyzed: 3.27 billion
Number of unique works identified out of those records: more than 174 million DanClancyAffidavit
