An Assessment of the Legibility of Google Books

摘要

The Google Books project has been criticized for faulty metadata, problems with search functionality, copyright infringement, and legibility of scanned texts. This article reports on the results of a preliminary study on the legibility of texts scanned by Google Books. A review of 2500 pages from 50 randomly selected books was undertaken . The results show less than 1 % of pages had errors that affected their legibility. This article suggests that while Google Books is not perfect, the majority of texts sampled were legible.