Workers Leaving the Googleplex from Andrew Norman Wilson on Vimeo.

What does Google and the book Brave New World have in common? They both have classes with each having separate accommodations. The top of the Google class gets ski trips, free food, holiday bonuses, etc. The classes are distinguished by the color badge that is associated with their name.

White badges are full time employees, red badges are contractors, and yellow badges are known as scan ops. The yellow badges work in building 3.1459~ and do not get the same benefits as almost everyone else. Their jobs are mainly to scan books for Google Book Search. Most of them are people of color who do not enjoy their job, but it pays the bills. Andrew Norman Wilson produced the above video and lost his job as part of his investigation. It is worth listening to.

[Gizmodo]

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) finds random words and text from scanned newspapers and books and since the text degraded over time in the scanned documents, spam bots have a hard time deciphering them. Now reCAPTCHA will be integrating this service into Google products to increase fraud and spam protection.

The technology used by reCAPTCHA’s Optical Character Recognition will also be used on the Google Book Search project. The OCR software built by reCAPTCHA will be able to search for text within the books that Google scans. The reCAPTCHA team will now be working for Google. The announcement was made by reCAPTCHA co-founder Luis von Ahn and Google Product Manager Will Cathcart on the Google Blog.

Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen wrote on the Google Blog that one of the greatest things about iPhones and the Android is that we are able to play games and watch videos while waiting in the post office line (ironically I was doing just that last week so I can relate).  But sometimes “we year for something more.”  This is why the Google Book Search team has created  a platform that allows us to read books right from our phone.  That’s right, Google Book Search has gone mobile with over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the U.S.

Best of all these books have been optimized to read on a small device.  This makes me question whether this was an effort to take on the Kindle directly.  After all it is rumored that Amazon has sold at least a million of those things.  By making millions of books available to anyone with a mobile device for free, why buy a Kindle?

The biggest advantage of the Kindle is that books are downloaded on the device.  The Internet is not required to read books like it is for Google Book Search.  The Kindle is ideal for use on airplanes.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I get most of my reading done when flying the friendly skies.   I think the only thing stopping me from buying the Kindle is the $359 starting price.  And when Google throws books at me for free… to go… It makes me want to buy the Kindle less.  What are your thoughts?

[via Google Book Search blog]