Slashdot Mirror
The Implications of Google's Digital Library
Connectmc wrote to mention a CNN article discussing Google's Digital Library project. From the article: "Tony Sanfilippo is of two minds when it comes to Google's ambitious program to scan millions of books and make their text fully searchable on the Internet. On the one hand, Sanfilippo credits the program for boosting sales of obscure titles at Penn State University Press, where he works. On the other, he's worried that Google's plans to create digital copies of books obtained directly from libraries could hurt his industry's long-term revenues."
would sound like this: "Buggy-whip makers concerned that new automobile may hurt industry revenues".
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe we shouldn't worry so much about the lost profits, but more about the knowledge we made avaible to the world...
If someone could explain to me the difference between this and a real LIBRARY I would love to hear it. Other than of course, the full text search available at my fingertips, the quick to get, no return fee aspect. I mean, the information is already 'free' it just becomes available in another media format.
Isn't anyone bothered by the fact that companies trying to secure "longterm revenues" are constantly preventing society from progressing as a whole? If a new idea or technology emerges that is going to put you out of business, it's time to do something else. Perpetuating the same crap year after year after year serves no purpose other than hindering progress.
. . . he's worried that Google's plans to create digital copies of books obtained directly from libraries could hurt his industry's long-term revenues.
Innovation usually reduces demand for the obsolete version. The fact is, books are a pain in the tail to search through any way you look at it. It's about time a serious effort is made to make printed material electronically searchable.
Seems to me that very few would object to Google creating and running a library on the model of public libraries. I go to our library two or three times each week to get books, music, and movies. I return the things I've borrowed and someone else borrows them.
Here's the problem: the digital stuff, especially the music, is very easy to copy. I copy some of it. The books however, are too difficult to copy and I don't need to own a copy anyway. (I've moved enough times in my life to realize how much books weigh and noticed that the library is significanly cheaper and Barnes & Noble or Amazon.)
But if Google runs a library, everything will be digital. That's fine if what they were lending was in the public domain, but, thanks to Disney et. al., public domain is a thing of the past.
Seems to me that a Google library will be a marketplace for copying. Then again, most of the people who run Google are about a foot and a half smarter than I am. So maybe they have this all figured out.
I'm curious to see what they come up with.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
With Google's book-scanning program set to resume in earnest in the northern autumn, copyright laws that long preceded the Internet look to be headed for a digital-age test.
Does a season have a direction?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
A man should be no more afraid of google's attempt to digitize information than a library's ability to purchase and distribute books for free.
On a side note, I am more likely to buy the paper version of a book than sitting and reading it off of a LCD display. Which I assume the average person would do the same.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Just like Gutenberg disrupted the Copyist Monk industry few century ago, Google library has the potential to completely change the way people find books, is it bad ? is it good ? I think it's just different and easier for the book's end user: us.
A bookseller who's worried that making books that are in the public domain available on the net will hurt his revenues.
The initial reaction I have is, 'Cry me a river.' These are books in the public domain and are meant to be freely available to everyone. Google's just making it easier.
My second reaction is that he might have a point, and he's deserving of some sympathy. But then I realize that he's a university bookseller. The books people pay for college and university classes are overpriced as it is, ($80 for my USED calculus text, and that was ten years ago; I can only imagine how much it is now.) Somehow I don't think that a university bookstore is going to be hurting all THAT much. So this is just another case of someone whose industry needs to 'evolve or die.' Though he really only has to worry if the textbook publishers 'evolve' before he does.
Besides, the printed word isn't going out of style anytime soon. There are plenty of books I prefer to have in dead tree form, to hold and read and carry with me on trips when I don't have or don't WANT to have my laptop with me. And what a lot of us on slashdot seem to forget is that not everyone in the world has a laptop or a PDA with e-book software on it.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Digital books are great for quick searches, but I still prefer the physical book (hard cover if possible) and will still purchase the physical book.
Why not incorporate both technologies and offer hard cover reprints of books that people request? Can anyone tell me how difficult it would be to do a single printing of a book? How expensive? Or what the minimum order would have to be to get the price down to $50 or less?
I have a lot of worn paperbacks that just are not available in hard cover.
A few books you just want to own, cherish, use every day and fill with page markers. For everything else, google would be wonderful..
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
When books can be converted easily and cheaply into an open digital format, and when someone creates an ebook reader that works effortlessly, the nail in the coffin of copyright laws will finally stick.
Music is already in search of a new structure, and the RIAA and recording industry is heading for chaos. The movie world is, too. More laws and regulations will stop nothing, the levee is breeched, freed information is now a tsunami wave, not an easily controlled trickle from a faucet.
I was thinking just yesterday that books are the last straw. The copyright lawyers know this. The politicians must be consciously avoiding talking about it. The book publishers must be meeting in back rooms wondering how to hold on to their previously rigid control.
Supporting Amazon made the publishers richer in the short run but enabled their future downfall. Print-on-demand is cheap enough to let everyone compete on fairly equal footing EXCEPT for promotion. Book stores, radio interviews of authors, best seller lists and other promotional tools have been controlled by the publishing industry.
When the free market has its way, we'll likely see more independent authors touring to sell their books by offering speaks engagements and a 'pick my brain' opportunity, similar to Indie bands and Indie moviemakers. Those guys can make a reasonable living doing reasonable work.
I go to the book store often, but like radio and TV, I don't see much individuality or uniqueness in books. I buy way more self published books (or by small publishers) especially when the authors appeal to me by touring to promote it with speaking engagements.
Just like the bands I love, book promotion will eventually be the right way to sell, when book contents are P2P'd easily. Just like mass music and mass movies.
Open 'piracy' of books en masse will give someone a reason to create a good ebook reader. Until now, its been a chicken-and-egg situation.
Oh, I know google won't pirate anything, but the door opening for free information will likely open wider.
Authors will always find an audience if they work hard enough.
I've always wanted a service like this--not for books that are in print and thus (relatively) easy to get, but for books that are out of print, and have been out of print for years.
I'm thinking particularly about relatively obscure academic books, which have short print runs...It's somewhat frustrating when you're researching to learn that yes, someone has already explored a particular line of questioning, but that his work is no longer in print and thus not easily available
Fortunately, at least some publishers are becoming responsive to this need. The Cambridge University Press have begun a print-on-demand service. Here's hoping it catches on.
I've learned that whenever an industry tries to resist progress/technology they always get the short end of the stick.
People want things faster and easier, and what people want ultimately will force, especially in a capitalist society (or something close to it), even non-profit industries to adapt.
RIAA resisted technology, and look what happened. Apple did not, and as such iTunes has been one of the greatest success stories in a while.
Books have been books for a very long time. I enjoy having a book in my hand, and that's how I would prefer to read it, but you wouldn't believe how many times I have been reading or re-reading a book and wished that I had a search function to look up this specific phrase that I remembered.
Google may get flak from Universities and publishers for its project, but ultimately, they are filling a void in a way that has been much needed for a very long time. It's an improvement, and that in itself will perpetuate the progress of Google's project, whether or not its Google who continues it.
FanFictionRecs.net
Google has unilaterally set this rule: Publishers can tell it which books not to scan at all, similar to how Web site owners can request to be left out of search engine indexes.
this is unfair. It feels like when Bart windmills his arms and walks towards Lisa, saying "I'm going to go like this, if you get hurt, it's your own fault".
publishers shouldn't have to be the ones punished into pulling a lot of hours into explicitly drawing up a list that tells Google to back off. Google should be the one hiring lots of guys to compose a list of all books they want to index into a polite application submitted to the publishers for approval.
if poor students aren't allowed to make photocopies of textbooks they need because they don't have written consent from the publishers, why does Google get special treatment like this?
Print one or two Paper Archive copies. Then release to the masses in E-form.
Distribution overhead reduces drastically
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
"...he's worried that Google's plans to create digital copies of books obtained directly from libraries could hurt his industry's long-term revenues."
Yeah, and Gutenberg's press had a devastating effect on long-term revenues of the copy-manuscripts-by-hand industry.
Feh.
Seriously, are we going to have some grand organization like the Book Publishing Association of America (BPAA) or the like now? Like the outdated methods the music industry uses, the trouble is even larger in the book industry. Thousands of books and authors are never read by millions of people because they are rare and obscure. There are research papers and knowledge to be grabbed that people cannot find because they are collecting dust in those dark libraries that are getting fewer and fewer visitors.
Simple fact is, that it is more convenient and more cost effective to distribute written matter online, and making it searchable is key to making it easy to find. Good ol' Dewey's system is beginning to show its age and things are not always easy to fine. Even the ISBN does not always work since a great many books never receive a number. Honestly, this should turn into a great thing for books and knowledge. If they truly secure it like they say they can, then we can expect sales of the obscure books to increase as people begin to discover informative works and educational pieces that have collected dust. More known works will also grab peoples attention now as they will be more easily accessible for searching as well...
Boy ain't technology a swell invention, if only people would embrace it like they said they would for years...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
IMHO books will never be obsolete, gazing at an LCD will never replace the printed page.
But then again I'm a graphic designer and I still love the Letterpress and all of it's shortcomings, they are sooo beautiful!
If anyone want to share do share. More you share the knowledge more you'll gain. Knowledge should not be a privilege of chosen few. No one should be deprieved of using resources which can be shared easily.
Spam: Any activity on internet to gain popularity without paying to advertising companies like Google.
Maybe Tony should really be worried about the Bookmobile (http://www.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php) which makes the information free and just charges for the printing - a true purification of the business model.
Anyway, how is this different from the million books project over at http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks ?
The real question is not whether some people will make less money than before, and others more than before. That is an inevitable consequence of technological progress.
The real question is: will this facilitate access to knowledge and culture without stifling new creation.
The answer can only be yes.
- Anonycous Moward
But for me, I need the paper, I've tried time and again to read a book online, I can get Art of War in about a million translations online, but I want a paper copy, because that one I bring on trips, I can feel the page, and I somehow feel more complete with the paper book.
I've read Mad on the computer, I own the 7 disc collection, but it's not the same, I can't do the fold in myself, try to figure out the joke, and laugh, it's all done for me, and it bores me. Most of the fun of flipping the page is missing, and the computer is a cold medium.
Let me get into that a minute, when I say cold I don't mean physically, I mean "spiritually". You come to a computer and it doesn't breath life when it pulls a page. Yes playing a game it definatly breaths a life all of it's own but when I read a book, I feel no life. Hell read a hand written composition from anyone and you're sure to get more life then any of those boring lifeless compositions you wrote in Highschool or College, where they force you to use a computer.
With hand writing you see the anger and the ferocity that people feel, the timidness, the self worth, and the genius of an author. Some of us including myself succeed because our hand writing will get almost violent to the point of illegability, but many people are hindered by the computer because the inner art of the word is almost completely lost.
Don't try to tell me about the warmth of the internet, I've never read a loving email that can match a simple handwritten letter. I can't match the love in it no matter how many words I use.
So we can see the computer or mass printing obviously will leave us lacking something. And then remove the paper all together and you lose another dynamic. Get an old book out of your closet, you smell the dust, perhaps see the water you spilt on it, a piece of food, or other memories. You might even remember you and a lover cuddling up reading your own books and holding each other, just from the paper. Google can't reproduce that, you can't cuddle up easily to read off a computer, maybe a PDA but there's no warmth, it's not organic, and it feels impure to read great old works on such technology to many people.
So for me at least I'll love the digital library in theory but I'll always want to buy complete copies of any books I want to read for anything more than a passing glance or reference because there's something that paper can handle where the computer loses it. I'll get knowledge about the book from google but there's still a person here who will buy the books anyways.
screw his revenue's. all information should be free. -acidjazz http://www.litebay.org/
when the PIAA will be formed?
*tongue in cheek*
C17H21NO4
and when I end up buying a book I tend not to ever finish reading it. This would be great for me. I'd be able to google a book that I had interest in for the minute, read enough of it to satisfy my mind, and then move on to the next! Google.com is the best!
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
My wife is working on getting her Masters in Library Information Sciences and I asked her what she thought about Google and their efforts. She actually is pretty much for their work, she thinks that speeding up searches through books will help people find the information and books they need a lot faster than the current method. Her main worry is that people are going to use this technology to bypass the book all together, and thereby possibly only getting a portion of the entirety of the book (seeing only one side of an argument, for example)
I blog, they blog, do you
FTFA: We're not aware of everything we've published," Sanfilippo said. "Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were no electronic files for those books."
Well the this would be of no benefit to you whatsoever.
Where is the threat? Industrius googlers terminal hopping to get a full book printed out?
The use of this technology drives sales. Say I'm doing research on a subject and need to know where a commonly known quote came from. Google presents Book, Publisher, Author, Page Number and Scan of the text I'm interested in. Purchase Link is right there.
If it is relevant to my research I can depart with my hard earned cash right from the comfort of my own browser.
Brilliant.
Amazon are you watching this?
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Imagine not allowing cars to be made because the people who made horse whips bitched!
The crowd is slamming resistance to Google when in fact Google has vastly overstepped its bounds.
They've told publishers and authors that they plan to scan every book - and if you don't like it, opt-out. Well, if you were an author or publisher, you'd be rightly pissed. The burden of having publishers list and input millions of titles in order to opt-out is absurd.
And Google will lose this fight in court when it gets there. They've gone from innovative ideas to almost a totalitarian approach to their projects. With this and their banning of CNET reporters because they offended the emperor, I mean, CEO of Google, we can see that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
" he's worried that Google's plans to create digital copies of books obtained directly from libraries could hurt his industry's long-term revenues."
His industry can go suck an egg.
Ehh...this is the life we chose.
I have used Project Gutenberg multiple times in the past to save on costs or trips to a book store for a short reference to an older book. Oddly, I have not seen any reference to this great resource in the discussion on the Google library.
Are there any plans on importing these works?
Is Google going to waste time re-scanning and proofreading the etexts that are already available and free-as-in-beer-and-speech?
I realize that PG is generally only for copyright expired, or works that are explicitly released to the Public Domain, but it has a quite extensive selection of texts already.
Personally, I would like to see Google maintain an index of PG's texts, but refer the user to the PG archives if they wish to download the full texts, or perhaps make a local official mirror to take a load of the PG's current servers. Perhaps Google Library could maintain the non-PD works, and make contributions to PG for PD works.
For those who have no knowledge of PG, here's a snippet from their site:
"Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.
Project Gutenberg Mission Statement:
To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
I own a copy of, for example, the 1990 Honda CRX service manual, published by Honda. I use this book anywhere from one to ten times a year.
If this were available online, I would not need to own it, since when I need to change my timing belt, I could just lookup the procedure online, and print out the relevant pages.
If this book were available at my local library, I'd still own it. I refer to it often enough that there's no point in repeatedly borrowing it from the library.
I can think of several similar examples. The IBM Power PC Programming Environments is another good one (which is available online, and which I don't own a dead-tree version of).
Remember what the CDROM did to Britannica?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Anyway, here's the quote:
"There's more to life than books you know, but not much more." - Morrissey
Surely the point of electronic publishing is, ultimately, to reduce the need for physical printing and (eventually) eliminate it.
The only objections to electronic publishing now are practical (it's harder to read an electronic book in bed, or whatever, or the screen is hard to look at for extended periods) or basically insane (books smell better than computers).
Eventually, cheap and highly usable electronic books will be available so that, for example, I don't need to lose my place in my O'Reilly reference books to look in their index, or keep multiple spots open with random cards and post-it notes, or carry half a suitcase full of books with me on vacation.
It is because of companies trying to squeeze every last drop out of the residual value that copyright has been extended in time and coverage. In consequence, I have a hard time being sympathetic. If you pursue a commercial model that you know, by definition, is beither tennable nor stable, then why should the rest of society foot the bill?
Did bookshops bail out the dot-com failures? No? Then why should computer companies bail out bookshops who are self-created disasters? There's nothing in either socialism or the free market that requires selective bail-outs. Socialism believes in bailing out without discrimination, the free market doesn't believe in bailing out at all for anyone and so doesn't discriminate either.
(The reason I'm not worried about progress is that I don't believe there's been any risk of society progressing for a long time. There have been few cultural improvements since the 1700s and the main advances in technology since then have been used more to cripple subsequent advances in culture.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No matter how good Google becomes at easing the separation between the desire to learn (curiosity) and the acquisition of knowledge (reading), it cannot replace the physical book.
Holding a book in your hards cannot be rivalved by any search engine, not even one that knows what you want before you think of it.
It may only be two pounds of solid cellulose, but this is mine and mine alone. I can curl up at night with my book and explore distant planets or long-lost continents.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Imagine being able to access to full text of any book anywhere. The possibilities are tremendous. We'll have to figure out a way to deal with copyright (or whatever we come up with), so that great work is still produced, but it will be tremendous.
Though I'm a bit concerned about the tainting of Google's business by political bias, and by silencing outlets who don't kowtow to their demands.
Which is to say, the traditional revenues we're talking about are derived from a system that is NUTS, and that couldn't need to be replaced more.
If there's an industry that's suffering from the costs of distribution more than book selling, I don't know what it is. Books weigh a ton, there's basically an infinite variety of them, and in order to sell a reasonable number you have to have a huge range on hand at any given moment.
Brick and mortar book stores apparently make money, but as someone who worked in them for years I can only say they do so because people have enormous, enormous love for the product and will overpay. People love the things -- it's not the text, it's the whole package.
This little publisher (or other academic presses) will keep cranking out books, and what Google and the big online sellers will do is change how the final products get distributed -- which is where the serious middleman's markup occurs. Maybe a small house will lose whatever barely-breaking-even gross revenues they get from the physical reproduction of the physical book, at some point. But that's not where the money is for them.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Copyright law exists for two reasons. First, it provides the author and/or publisher with certain rights which allows them a profit. But it then, and maybe more importantly in this case, provides the consumer with certain rights regarding the use of copyrighted material. If copyright locked down material to the extent that many people believe it would be difficult to gain any benefit from access to information. These consumer rights are usually referred to as "fair use." Two major examples of fair use are libraries and book reviews.
IANAL, but in TFA, a lawyer opined that Google also had a strong case for protection under fair use. No it's not the same as a brick and mortar library, but Google traded off having a limited number of copies of a book for limiting a clients access within a book. Book reviews have long been held to be protected by fair-use and they often quote long passages of a book. Google provides the opportunity to look inside a book without mediation by a reviewer, but serves much the same function in helping the consumer decide whether the book is an important resource for them.
...that one corporation could be in control of our entire written history?
If Google succeeds, and libraries and printed books go the way of the dinosaur, what happens if Google decides to make some content unavailable, or charge exhorbitant fees?
They already 'own' the entire archive of Usenet. I am not aware of any other source for this information.
Free today, gone tomorrow...
FIXME: Add a sig here
Google is being *nice* to the publishers.
feh. stuff.
Libraries used to be about providing price discrimination for books. Maybe it's time we found a better model?
It will be interesting to see if this has a similar advertising effect as that experienced by the Baen free book library. Cory Doctorow has had very good results from giving his books away over the Internet, and there is evidence that P2P is actually driving some growth in the music industry.
Playing devil's advocate here...
A few posts made the note that they only care about their long-term revenues and not about the proliferation of knowledge. However, many of these books would never have been written if authors are never paid. Granted, perhaps Google or another enterprising company could change the way books are published by providing electronic versions and printing and selling paper versions on demand or something to that extent. But, in the current system publishers make authors' works available to the masses. They both profit from it and they wouldn't keep doing it if copyright didn't exist, which would mean a lot of knowledge would never have proliferated in the first place.
Not everyone is as generous to share their knowledge for free like the wikipedia community does. It's human nature to only do things because it benefits you in some way or another and revenues from book sales is probably why most writers continue to write, not because they're overflowing with generousity (sp?).
Staring at a screen is almost the equivalent to staring into a low powered flashlight for hours at a time.
Unless there is a fundamental change in screen technology, hurting eyes will remain.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Google contends that this activity is justified as "fair use". If that contention is held up in a court of law, then Google is doing the publishers a favor--their activity wouldn't be considered illegal, and thus they do not have to allow the publisher to opt out at all.
However, if the courts deem that this activity falls outside of the jurisdiction of fair use, then Google is in the wrong. They would be obligated to recieve explicit consent from each publisher for each copyrighted book they wish to include in their service.
Unfortunately, I found this information within a printed source (irony, anyone?), and so do not have a link to provide for verification purposes.
Publishers shouldn't have to bear the burden of record-keeping, agreed Sanfilippo, the Penn State press's marketing and sales director. "We're not aware of everything we've published," Sanfilippo said.
Oh I get it, publishers don't care enough about their own rights holdings to keep records of them, so they want everybody else to do the legwork for them. This is like land owners saying they can't be bothered putting up fences and posting signs, but they want penalties enforced against trespassers anyway. The world of out-of-print books thus becomes a vast, unmapped minefield that everybody is supposed to tiptoe through. And of course copyrights should also last forever. Is there anything else we can get you? Some cake?
...because as illiterate as the US is, they couldn't possibly sell fewer books.
Our university did that with a few textbooks which had gone out of print. The company charged them a small fee for printing out the text of the book and selling it in a binder. It was a good sight cheaper than the rest of my college textbooks ($5 for a 200-page textbook? Unbelievable...), although unfortunately, the printing quality was along the lines of a 2nd-generation xerox.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
You know, outside of those works where no one knows who owns it (which the publishers seemed to be complaining about in the article... "We can't prove we own that book, but we want the profits from it!"), I suspect Google could afford to buy a copy of every single book in its library with what amounts to their budget for snackfoods for the month. That is, assuming the authors, wanting more publicity, don't donate a copy of their books to Google much as they do with regular libraries.
The simultaneous access bit is a bit more troubling, although one might ask if it's really something intentionally built into libraries.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
(The reason I'm not worried about progress is that I don't believe there's been any risk of society progressing for a long time. There have been few cultural improvements since the 1700s and the main advances in technology since then have been used more to cripple subsequent advances in culture.)
Gee, I suppose an extra thirty-five to forty years of life expectancy at birth (since 1850!) isn't really an improvement in society. I dunno about you, but I'd rather live in a society where I won't expect to die before I turn forty. Or a society where we don't tend to murder each other quite as much as we did three hundred years ago. (I don't have a copy of Freakonomics handy, but murder rates in Europe are down by something like an order of magnitude since then.)
Are you claiming that running around dying young and being murdered (c. 1700) wasn't really that bad? Or are you complaining that the radio doesn't play music that you like?
It's a common trope to whine that technology never changed basic human nature. It's so common that it's taken for granted. It's also entirely wrong. Technology is the only thing that has ever changed so-called "basic human nature".
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Isn't this the earlier Google Print project, just now restarted again? Didn't they just let the users search the text, but only preview about the 3-4 first pages or so? If that's the case, I can't see how this would possibly do anything beyond increasing sales as customers get more aware of the books.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Suppose you substituted the word 'Microsoft' for the word 'Google' in this topic. Would this change your opinion of how immensely cool this is? I always dreamed of all the worlds books online... but I never considered them being controlled by a private corporation -- I was thinking more of public ownership, like a library. Won't the _scans_ of public domain text and images be copyrighted? This is how it works now I believe -- they don't claim ownership of the source material, but their scans, indexes and digital presentation are company property -- in perpetuity. And sometimes the orignal works are not available to the public, so you can't go in and scan it yourself.
Various schemes have been tried to allow digital access via subscription, but the real value of a university library is the journals for most academic research.
What happens when Google wants to start including these?
-- Robert D Feinman Landscapes, Panoramas, Photoshop Tips and Musings on Society
BPAA -- Book-Publishing Association of America... ...suing a book-downloader near you.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
is that Google does not allow more than a small fraction of the book to be exposed to the public. So, no matter how many searches you did, it'd still not let you at the large proportion that wasn't customer-facing.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
...but DAMN, it's true. When's a practical e-book reader coming out? The applications for college students alone would be STAGGERING -- can you imagine never needing to shell out $1000+/semester again (as I just did)?
Not that this would benefit consumers alone. There'd be, as you said, almost zero distribution overhead, and publishers could make absolutely insane profit by charging what they do now (or even a fraction of it would still skyrocket their profit margins). Brick-and-mortar bookstores would still have plenty of business -- paper books aren't going anywhere -- but it's so long since past time we switch from paper to silicon, at least for expensive books and textbooks. Or anything that weighs over three pounds, honestly.
Yet another reason why I should be in charge of running the world...
I don't think this is really fair use. What google has done is copied the whole book, and is handing out a copy of a portion of the text to anyone who asks. They don't really have a right to do this. Just like I don't have the right to grab a song off a cd, put it on 100 other cds, and hand out a copy to anyone who asks.
:-P
I like google. But the "If you don't want us to do this then you have to tell us before we do it!" argument is stupid. If I punched a guy in the nose, and then stated at trial "If he didn't want to be hit he should have told me!" I'd be laughed out of court. You can't take away someone's rights because they didn't tell you they wanted to keep them.
IANAL, and the first one to take the rights sentence above and bash a politician is a rotten troll!
There's nothing quite like seeing the original document. The ASCII text is great, don't get me wrong but it obviously can't do images, diagrams and the like. The space implications are obviously huge.
Google could get round the copyright problems by starting with the books in the Gutenberg list, already out of copyright.
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In my opinion, this is the first time Google has signaled their intent to do evil. Virtually every DRM method gets cracked. It's inevitable. Google knows this and they don't care. I've been asked repeatedly if I sell PDF versions of my book and my answer has always been "No, because I want to sell more than one copy." As a self-published author, the prospect of digital copies of my book floating around terrifies me. I spent six years working on my book on evenings and weekends. I paid for the printing out of my pocket. I don't expect to be well-paid for my efforts, but I do expect to be paid. Finally, publishers aren't all big companies. Many are small little operations run out of modest homes, teetering precariously on the brink of insolvency.
The point is the interface. The 'interface' of dead wood books is extremely humane: no menus, no modes, no unecessary choice of fonts and fit page to whatever.
I disagree: I think the interface for paper books is horrible! I can't adapt the font, or the formatting; so old books written with text in small columns with small print (like my father's 100 yr old copies of the Three Musketeers) are quaint, but horrrible on the eyes. I'd get dizzy reading those; I've never had that problem when reading from my Palm Pilot, and I freely admit that a Palm Pilot is hardly the world's best display technology! The Palm, though limited, can be made to adapt to my needs; and the book can't; not without reprinting the whole thing.
Books don't have any modes; but they don't have any memory, either! Unless I physically mark the page I left off reading each time, the book interface resets, and forgets the page I left off reading at. That's a lousy UI!
Instead, direct physical response, you know where you are.
No, I don't! I know that if I lose my grip on the book, it will reset on me, and I can't recover the last page accessed, and I can't even search for familar text, except guessing which pages I've read, and scanning for something that looks like where I left off.
Physical page manipulation is also very slow. I can't read books quickly, because I have to keep moving my neck from one page to the next, then fumbling to switch pages! You need to balance the book in one hand, and then press down on the page using enough friction to lift the corner enough for your to grab it, pull it over to the other side, smooth it down, and then return to the reading position.
Worse, I have to waste cognition on managing these physical processes, so I can't focus on reading the book; I have to worry about the friction under my fingers, whether the page has flipped cleanly, whether I lifted one page or two, and a lot of other UI tasks unrelated to reading the book. That's a poor interface!
On a PDA, I can hold the book in one hand, keep my eyes on the text (which all fits within my field of view, so I don't need to move my head), and I just twitch my thumb to depress the "next page" rocker-button; my eyes then flick to the top of their field of view. I can read continuously, with only tiny pauses to twitch my thumb and flick my eyes.
It's faster, more reliable, and more efficient. I don't have to think about whether flipping pages worked, I don't have to work out where the book moved relative to my eyes, so retracking is faster and easier, I can just *read*, not fumble about!
I can flip pages with the same hand that I hold the PDA with, leaving my other hand free to open doors, pet my cat, or any of a number of other tasks. If the phone rings, I have a hand to answer it with. If I set it down, I don't lose my page. A book just doesn't do that.
Furthermore, there is no problem with energy supply. You can fall asleep over your dead wood reading without any worries. The dead wood will be there tomorrow, no system to crash or similar.
No, you can't! You have lots of worries! Dead wood is quite fragile! You can tear a page very easily; old books practically fall apart when you touch them. You have to be very, very careful! Wood turns yellow and discoloured, it's horribly difficult to backup, and it's easy to destroy from fire or water damage. No physical media is safe; and making offsite backups is far, far more expensive and time consuming than any other form of storage.
Also you do not have to perform strange tasks like locating a document in a hierachical filesystem.
No, instead you have to perform strange tasks like locating a book in a library or bookstore instead. This usually entails several miles of time-wasting physical travel, locating an obscure code using a search computer (often using a hierarchial topic search!), matching the obscure code to the book you want, and then running through a checkout or purchase procedure.
Um... because money isn't information. And donating information is different than donating money.
I'm a computer techinician, and I share ALL information I have freely and free of charge. If someone wants to pick my brain for long, they can pay me for my time and experience, which is the only thing I bill for. The more information is kept free, the freer the world will be.
I would LOVE my job to become obsolete, because it would mean we're getting somewhere.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
He's right, you know.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
I think one of the major reasons for Google to be doing this is to detect sites that have simply scanned in dozens of books and presetn the content as their own along side ads, to make quite a fair bit of money. There are many sites out there that do this. Google already detects duplicate content across web sites (ie sites that scrape others), but its a bit difficult when the content has been 'scraped' from a book.
I.O.U One Sig.
IANAL either, but if Google had purchased all of the books, and retained possession of them after scanning, I believe that Google would have no problems arguing that it's a case of fair use. I think the point that the publishers have been stressing is that Google is borrowing the copies from the library, making copies of the entire work, and returning the books to the library, and that's why it's a copyright violation, even if they only provide fair-use portions to the Google users.
A few CDs you just want to own, cherish, and put in the CD rack for the prestige of owning it. They are rarely used. For everything else, a high quality rip is wonderful..
Author's should do more book readings, or something.
I jest, but with todays wealth of information available freely online, I dont see why there should be so many new books that publishers are trying to sell. We should be using older works as references rather than writing new versions of everything, constantly. For example, a grade 10 maths book should fall into public domain eventually, and be corrected as required. This would mean the children of today could see the history of grade 10 maths as well as the content.
Lecturers would then need to go back to research, rather than rehash, and without the revenue stream of textbooks, lecturers would have a bit more incentive to do a bit of innovation.
Isn't it true that they're only doing this for works in the public domain already, i.e. libraries? In other words, aren't these works already 100% available to everyone in the community?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
From TFO: copyright laws that long preceded the Internet look to be headed for a digital-age test..
Haven't napster et al demonstrated that already?
Now Google is being sued buy the Authors Guild for massive copyright infrigment in US District court. Seems clear to me. Google is NOT a library but a for profit corporation and therefore commercial use is prohibited under law. I wrote a published short story in college which I hold the copyright to and if was to show up I would sue. Google seems to argue you can contact them and they will remove the material. Hmmmm I thought copyrights were to prevent corporations from using it without FIRST getting it authorized. Do no evil my ass.
from the article on cnn:
"We're not aware of everything we've published," Sanfilippo said. "Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were no electronic files for those books."
This is the epitomy of the debasement of knowledge by abusers of copyright law. The publisher has no rights to a copyrighted work other than what the copyright holder granted them. Hence, if they have no records, they have no rights.
I sure wouldn't call what Google are* doing wrong, not with the copyright law extended to such an absurd length as it currently is. I would, however, think that it might be dangerous.
* Since I don't accept that a corporation is a person, it would seem this needs a plural voice. Therefore "Google are..." rather than "Google is...".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes, without copyright.
What one writes is private, what one publishes is public.
I do believe in privacy rights, and contractual obligations.
Publishing a file you find on my computer is a violation of my privacy. I would have grounds to sue you and anyone else who distributed my private information.
The screenwriter would enter into a contractual relationship with either the studio, an agent, or a reviewer.
In a contract free world, a sample and a good review from a repected reviewer could get the funding for the movie, sight unseen.
Even if you publish a great work for free, and get nothing for it, you get reputation. If people like your work, they will want more, and they will pay you to write it. It is supply and demand, and it does not need copyright to work. Fans will find a way to get you money.
Abolish Copyright. Restore Freedom.
Google uses OCR for their books. It's not horrible, but it's far from perfect. If you looked at the text that the OCR output, it'd look like... well, like OCR output. But you see the page image, not the OCR'd text, and that's good enough for what it's doing.
What would be useful would be for Google to release the scanned pages of public-domain books, much like the Million Book Project does, so that they could be spiffed up properly by Distributed Proofreaders and made into high-quality ebooks distributed by Project Gutenberg.
Who knows; maybe they'll even do that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But then that system is no less abusive than any other.
What consitutes as distribution or publishing? If Im spending 10 years to write a book can I let no one look at it to edit it? The moment I send them the file, its public domain since only copyright right now protects that person from abusing it instead of just editing it.
Content creators are often teams of people. What stops one of them from running off and abusing the work the team created without copyright? Right now, the copyright is owned by the team so if one of them runs off and says, sells the content and makes millions and doesn't share, it's illegal. Without copyright, those copies of the content the team is passing back and forth are now public domain.
Unless you believe in instituting another different system to protect works "unpublished" and then what consitutes as unpublished.
Why does the screenwriter have to enter a contract with the film company? Why cant the film company use the script regardless of whether or not the screenwriter wants them too.
No sense of humor at all, eh?
Sending an email to your friend does not constitute publication, nor does sending it to someone with whom you have a contractual relationship.
I would say a good general rule is that if it is not put before the public with the consent of the author(s), it is not published. My friends and colleauges are not the public, and they have no right to distribute what I show them in confidence. It's published when you give the information to strangers.
As copyright is being dissolved, the law would need to be changed to repect this privacy.
The screenwriter would enter into a contract with whoever he's showing the script to so that they can't distribute it, or use it without paying him.
Also, it would be in the interests of studios not to get a reputation of ripping off artists
Abolish Copyright. Restore Freedom.