Google Opens Digital Library to EU

Kailash Nadh writes "Google Inc. is asking European book publishers to submit non-English material to its Internet-leading search engine a move that may ease worries about the company's digital library relying too heavily on Anglo-American content. The Google Print undertaking represents a major piece of Google's effort to convert printed material into a digital format so it can be called up from any computing device with an Internet connection. By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue."

Comments

Non English content is awesome!

[DanCentury]

If it weren't for the non-English books at my college library (Rutgers), I don't know what I would have done. All the English books were stolen, vandalized, or had pages torn out (partially stolen?).

Similarly, maybe the foreign language servers will has less traffic and it will be easier to get the info I need.

I'm glad I can read more than one language.

Why thank you, Captain Obvious!

[L. VeGas]

"By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue.

I thought they were doing it because they wanted to show off.

fact or assumption

[Suppafly]

By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue

Is that a fact or an assumption?

You never know

[Lifewish]

It might help you learn a few more languages. My experience is that the best way to get relatively fluent in a language is to get a copy of Harry Potter in said language and sit down with a cup of hot choccy and a dictionary.

Interesting...

[duckumu]

It seems like the attitude toward Google is changing a lot. A few years ago I don't think we would have thought Google's motivation would be necessarily to gain massive revenue, but instead to create just a huge database for the public good...

Yet another move towards...

[Mr. Sketch]

This is yet another move by google to it's new product: Google Purge

A lot of potential for translation

[bedroll]

If programmatic translation continues to improve then this could really be something huge. Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language, available to anyone who desires in their native tongue.

Will it last?

[Alex P Keaton in da]

I hope that we don't end up getting rid of the hard copies for archival purposes...
I am not a ginat Rall fan, but he has a good point in this article...
Cultural Suicide via Digitalization
Ted Rall
NEW YORK--Compact discs won't skip. They'll play even if you scratch them. Unless you break them or set them on fire, they'll last forever. That's the sales pitch the recording industry used to convince America to switch from vinyl records to CDs. But, as anyone who owns a hairy dog or cat knows, CDs do skip. And as anyone who uses them to store computer files knows, digital data stored on them eventually vanishes in a mysterious phenomenon called "data rot." "With proper care this Compact Disc will last a lifetime," promised the packaging on the first digital recordings. Now experts wonder whether they'll make it 20 years. Without discussion or debate humanity has committed itself to the wholesale digitalization of its collective cultural and historical information base. Music, movies, manuscripts, everything from letters between presidents to merchants' financial transactions are currently created and stored in strictly digital form--a development that fulfills George Orwell's prophecy that history would become mutable, now with a few keystrokes. Even more terrifying than the likelihood that the digitalization of history will be abused in the service of tyranny is the certainty that we are setting the stage for the greatest loss of knowledge since the destruction of the Royal Library at Alexandria.
Continued here.... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20050824/cm_ucru/afat eworsethandeath

Re:Will it last?

[JesseMcDonald]

If digital information was stored with the same level of redundancy that "analog" data is stored with, these issues wouldn't exist. In fact, even a low level of redundancy would probably be sufficient to protect against nearly all loss. The "analog" records you refer to can be reconstructed not because they were stored on paper, but because the complete record can be restored from a small fraction of the original, making the paper record much like a simple, but massively redundant, RAID array. With digital records, we can move those portions we care to keep into proper archives before they disappear. If it wasn't illegal to copy the information on those CDs, then with proper care (including periodic transfers to new discs) the information on them really could be preserved forever. The process would be completely lossless and nearly automatic, whereas a paper document (which will still eventually become unreadable, albiet over a much longer period of time) can only be copied by hand, with a much greater (and thus less likely) expenditure of effort. Finally, the information in a paper document is fundamentally symbolic in nature, and thus equivalent to the corresponding digital information. It is not analog, because the information is stored as sequences of a finite number of discrete patterns. The underlying analog medium (the ink and paper, for example) can degrade gradually, but the words themselves are either preserved as written or not. Any symbolic information (including digital) could be stored on the same medium, and would be similarly preserved.

Re:Will it last?

[dvdeug]

I hope that we don't end up getting rid of the hard copies for archival purposes...

There is one or two copies of many books; one library fire, and they're gone. In many cases, they're virtually gone now; the only way to view the copy is to travel to where the physical copy is and get easily denied permission to view it.

There is a film that shows a clip from an earlier film, and proclaims that it will be watched for generations. That clip is all that exists of that earlier film.

There's no chance that any of the modern popular films will disappear completely. It may come down to recovering it from a DivX, but enough people have copies and make backups of those copies, that it won't completely disappear. If the Internet Archive was destroyed, films that formerly existed in few copies would still be on hard drives all over the world, and will be on backups well into the 22cd century.

Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Search
Google Maps
Gmail
Google Library
Froogle
Google Offline
Google Talk
etc.

It's just a matter of time before Google TV will appear. Google's goal seem to be to wrap itself all around you.

Digital Libraries? What are book burners to do?

[Safe Sex Goddess]

If all the books in the library are digital, doesn't that keep the book burners from having their fun?

On a more serious note, how does one insure the intergrity of digital collections. Things can disappear or be replaced with more politically acceptable alternatives.

Re:Digital Libraries? What are book burners to do?

[Uukrul]

On a more serious note, how does one insure the intergrity of digital collections.

Backups? You can't do that with a paper-book. You can burn Alenxandria, but you can't delete all the Internet.

Re:google book

[Anonymous Coward]

http://print.google.com/

Google did *NOT* open digital library to EU

[Danuvius]

Under an expansion announced Thursday, the Mountain View-based company opened its ambitious Google Print book-scanning project to publishers in France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands and Spain.

The European Union is made up of 25 countries, only 5 (20%) of which are invited to submit materials. Clearly google was going not for the EU, but for all the countries in Europe that Americans heard about before or would consider vacationing in.

Thank you for reminding us that as far as America is concerned, Europe ends at the German and the Italian borders (and doesn't include a bunch of countries even west of there). It's now officially okay to forget about Poland, Belgium, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Latvia, Sweden, Lithuana, Finland, and Austria.

Re:Google did *NOT* open digital library to EU

[Crafack]

-no-one has yet mentioned the UK. Why do people act like it isn't part of Europe?

Wishful thinking, perhaps ?

/Crafack

Desperate Move

[scottennis]

From the article:

"By reaching out to European publishers, Google hopes to substantially increase the volume of non-English books in its database, said Jim Gerber, director of content partnership for Google's print program."

What it should say is:

"By reaching out to European publishers, Google hopes to substantially increase the pressure on big American publishing houses who have balked at their attempts to catalog the mass-marketed books that they make money on and which Google knows will draw shitloads of traffic to their site, pushing up their advertising revenue said Jim Gerber, director of content partnership for Google's print program."

Oh, that's not the issue, you silly man, I can hear some of you say. But as a small, independent publisher who joined Google Print several months ago and who's books are still in "pending" status, I have to wonder why they would be soliciting European publishers when they can't seem to get my few books into their Almighty Index.

Oops. Forgot. I'm a nobody. A small businees. Nodody really gives a rat's ass about my books because they don't come with instant recognition, branding, and millions of marketing dollars already spent.

My few books may be quality, but they probably won't bring in the buh-zillion hits and generate the goog-illion dollars that the Google shareholders need to justify their $285 stocks.

It's okay guys. I understand that you don't really want to be evil, it's just that as a publicly traded company you now have a fiduciary responsibility to be evil.

Re:I wonder how this is going to work?

[SEE]

The Germans, as with most other European countries adopted life+50 decades ago, back when the U.S. term was still a fixed 28 plus renewal for 28.

And the EU as a whole, including Germany, adopted life+70 several years before the U.S.

Further, the EU adoption (unlike the U.S.) was fully retroactive, not just extending the terms of books under copyright, but pulling books back out of the public domain and under copyright.

The sorry fact is, compared to the EU, the U.S. has a large and healthy public domain.