Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

The first project that Google ever described as a “moonshot” wasn’t self-driving cars or bringing the Internet to remote parts of Africa: It was putting books online. In 2002, “Project Ocean” – Google’s plan to digitize all the world’s books – started with seven million volumes from the University of Michigan library. Truckloads of books showed up at Google headquarters, where specially built stations with human page-turners captured them at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. Google went on to scan the books housed at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library, and more. By 2015, the company...