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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."
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? I believe that they mean to indicate that it will begin during Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere (September-December).
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 ?
Seasons differ depending on what hemisphere of the planet you live in. I assume it means the time of Autumn relative to the Northern world.
C17H21NO4
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."
The /. synopsis leaves a bit out as usual. Google is going to some pretty good lengths to make sure the system is not exploited in any non-fair use ways.
For instance, you can only read a few pages of the book related to your search. And even if you search multiple times, you can only read a few more pages. You can not use google to download the entire book for free.
Also, google is cutting publishers in on the advertising for the pages their book is displayed on.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you don't know WTF you're talking about. "What Google is doing is forbidden by law" isn't the case. Making a handful of lines of text available as a search result is clearly within fair-use, which doctrine has extensive support within case law and by statute. Look it up.
This is a related product. In the case of Google Print, the publisher provides the a digital version of the source material, and is able to choose a percentage of the book available to browsers. With Google Library, Google is creating the digital version via scanning/OCR, and if it's public domain (apparently using the simple rule of being published prior to 1923, and not the more complete, albeit time-consuming rule of validating whether the post-1922 copyright was actually renewed), then the entire book is available for perusal, otherwise only a sentence or two is available from the Google Library search. It's possible that with the current agreements between Google and the publishers, they may be allowing Google to display a larger set of results in the Google Library, but I suspect not, as Google is treading a thin line with respect to Fair Use.
Try reading this ... http://creativecommons.org/getcontent/features/doc torow