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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."
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."
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
"...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.
That sort of printing on demand is really difficult. Hard cover books have a different sort of binding process than they use on paperbacks...On a paperback, they just slap some glue on it, and throw a cover on it...Not much reason this couldn't be done at least somewhat on demand.
The costs of print runs go up because of negatives and plates, etc, or just plates if you're in the "Modern" age. I heard some stuff about Xerox working on a machine to do one offs, but I don't know anythign about it. With current techniques though, you have to set up a ton of stuff and run a whole lot of things through in a specific order, and it involves a lot of people, etc.
I think in the long run, we'll end up going digital for all kinds of paperback crap. Why do we need those? They're so cheaply made that bookstores destroy them if they can't be sold and only send the covers back to the distributer.
On the other hand I think this'll create a niche market for nice hardcovers as well.
Still I'd much rather see the books freely available, especially in digital format.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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!
Profits seem to reduce drastically too. (Hey! I'm a corrupt mayor! I'm required to be greedy!)
Maybe you shold consult with the underwear gnomes to see where profits fit in to your equation.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
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 ?
when the PIAA will be formed?
*tongue in cheek*
C17H21NO4
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.
My brother used to work in a company that printed law books, except they weren't bound books, he'd drop in a couple dozen reams of paper with 3 hole punch into a big Xerox made machine and out would come books, or the essence of them anywho, they would get dumped into 3 ring binders and sold off to lawyers. He would do a print run of a hundred or so copies, it wasn't quite print on demand but it was close
I seem to remember the company's name was Bender, and got bought by Penguin.
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."
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
(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
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.
Well, when you leave out the part that the publisher doesn't have digital records, it might sound that way. They just shouldn't be expected to have to sift through their paper records from that period for Google's benefit.
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.