Sergey Brin - Favorite Books

If the books average 100 pages and he read a page every 40 seconds, that works out over 2 years of continuous reading for 16 hours per day. So this isn't real.

the beginning of Googlebot! more from the linking page

  Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web
   by Sergey Brin.

"We demonstrate a technique for extracting relations from the WWW based on the duality of patterns and relations. We experiment with it by extracting a relations of books. WebDB Workshop at EDBT '98 (postscript)."

The source says the page was created on Jan 14th, 1998 and it was created automatically from hundreds of sources on the web.

Going up a level to his main directory you get:

# Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web

by Sergey Brin. We demonstrate a technique for extracting relations from the WWW based on the duality of patterns and relations. We experiment with it by extracting a relations of books. WebDB Workshop at EDBT '98 (postscript).

Because the title is linkbait, and people are automatically upvoting based on how appealing the title sounds, rather than based on the content.

This indicates a more general problem for HN: how do you get people to vote based on content, rather than title?

I'm not sure I have a good, practical solution.