A project firmly embedded in the pop-culture debate between the merits of the digital text and the physical text, The Art of Google Books celebrates the generative nature of transmediation.
Single-topic blogs prove that isolation aggrandizes everything, and this is no different; by reading as a collector and aggregating my finds, I promote the signs of use that accompany digitized books as worthy of both academic study and aesthetic exhibition.
In other words, Google Books is more than a bag of words.
It's full of anomalies--digital and analog signs of use. Search through texts in the public domain, and you'll find all kinds of distortion, color changes, misplaced autolinks, and, frequently, the hands of an employee. You'll stumble upon marginalia, paper ephemera, and traceable provenance. Sometimes, you can even catch a glimpse of the tools that are used in the digitization process.
And when I say you, I mean you. Go on a hunt and submit your find: because the collaborative nature of the project is tantamount to what is found; because what you find in a database of more than 20 million digital books will be striking and diverse; because there's some remarkable artwork waiting to be found.
