Shakespeare on Google

Google Books already has the full-text works of Shakespeare online, and they have just created a page bringing it all together to make it more easily accessible. This highlights what can be done once you have created a huge database of digitized books. Google will continue to explore interesting (and profitable) was package up books in the same way to make their collection more accessible and timely. The Shakespeare page is in support of New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park event.

It is easy to imagine some of the ways that Google will be able to leverage this valuable asset of scanned texts in the future. What appears to be a simple full-text database for search, can be repackaged in a thousand ways.

It is easy to overlook how profoundly important the digitization of books will be. Shakespeare is a bad example, as his works are amongst the best disseminated texts on the planet, but for many important (and unimportant) books, digitization will get them out of the library basement and in to the hands of anyone with an Internet connection.