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We've given awards to 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities:Steven Abney and Terry Szymanski, University of Michigan. Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts.Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, George Mason University. Reframing the Victorians.Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University. Classics in Google Books.Miles Efron, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques.Brian Geiger, University of California-Riverside, Benjamin Pauley, Eastern Connecticut State University. Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.David Mimno and David Blei, Princeton University. The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.Alfonso Moreno, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books.Todd Presner, David Shepard, Chris Johanson, James Lee, University of California-Los Angeles. Hypercities Geo-Scribe.Amelia del Rosario Sanz-Cabrerizo and José Luis Sierra-Rodríguez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts.Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia. JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web.Timothy R. Tangherlini, University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Leonard, University of Washington. Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.

ephemeral material supplied the main business of the early publishing industry. Classical authors, we are told, accounted for “around 5 percent of all printed books published in the 15th century.”

Pettegree writes well and amasses information superbly. He refrains from explicitly comparing the technology of print, and its historical impact, with the technology of the Internet. Implicit similarities include issues of intellectual property and privacy, of power, of libel, as well as a general challenge to old modes — the proliferation of personal expression, the contentiousness, the question of how to capitalize, and capitalize upon, a new medium. This scholarly restraint, leaving his readers to compare and contrast, seems wise. And there are certainly contrasts with the modern age.

In an appended “Note on Sources,” Pettegree allows himself to acknowledge that, “Ironically, it has been the next great information revolution — the Internet — that has allowed this work on the first age of print to be pursued to a successful conclusion.” Digital information newly available from all over the world enhanced his research on early print culture — in all its frequently vulgar, ephemeral, zany and menacing variety.

The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years. It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.

This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links. For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip.

Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.

The Internet is burning up with speculation about Apple Inc.'s plans for an “iPad,” a potential new entrant in the e-reader market of low-power digital devices whose displays approach paper quality.

E-readers' adoption is still tiny – just 1.5 per cent of American consumers own one, and fewer in Canada – but Ms. Rotman Epps believes these gadgets will change our reading habits while throwing several industries into turmoil.

According to her research, book publishers are where music publishers were in 2001 when the iPod launched: