Larry Page (Google founder) had always wanted to digitize books. In 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a crawler that would ingest docuмents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort to develop a universal digital library. The idea was that, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons.