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Yahoo Competes with Google in Book Scanning
UltimaGuy writes "A consortium backed by Yahoo has launched an ambitious effort to digitize classic books and technical papers and make them freely available on the Web. The company is partnering with the newly formed Open Content Alliance, which aims to offer PDF documents of books to the public at no charge. Consumers will be able to search the contents of the Open Content Alliance's database and download the entire content of any work, such as a scanned copy of a book."
I liked the idea the first time I heard it - back when it was called Project Gutenburg. :P
16k ebooks to choose from today, more to come, no Google, no Yahoo.
http://www.gutenberg.org/
In the US, books published after 1922 can still be public domain if the author was American, it was originally published in the US, and the copyright was not extended at the end of the original copyright period. Google Library does not seem to be making an exception for this, will OCA? Project Gutenberg does.
Actually this won't "Upstage" google in any way.
FTA:
all the content will be made available so it can be indexed by all the other major search engines, including Google's
Yahoo is just going to scan, scan and scan. We all already prefer google's indexing and searching and cleaner interfaces, so the only thing Yahoo! will accomplish by this is help google print along, sheilding all (other) copyright law suits. Once the stuff is online, we all know that Google-bots will be all over it "like a fly on a pile of very seductive manure (Zapp)"
Excellent.
I just hope publishers realise that in this case neither google or yahoo is trying to be their best friend.
There's a slight difference between an 'Internet-based library' and 'searching inside books'.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
The fact that it's an open, documented format?
Adobe has made their money the old-fashioned way, by making tools that work well, rather than by locking people into a format. GhostScript, among others, will read those PDF's with or without Adobe.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Google Print's goal is to allow people to search book content, WITHOUT giving them the content of the book.
For example, searching "Zoroastrianism" would return a list of book titles on the subject, and links to purchase the books in question. You CANNOT download the content of the book!
The OCA (The group Yahoo just joined) is an opt-in, full content hosting project.
Searching "Zoroastrianism" would return a (much smaller) list of books, with the *full* content of the book available for download with the explicit consent of the publisher/author!
"Does anyone else find there is no way to read a PDF with the scroll buttons..."
... regardless of the application and platform used to create it." Blame the creators of that particular pdf file if you don't like the headers, footers and margin size. When I make pdf books to read on the train...I just finished Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath by Lovecraft...I open the original ascii text file in Word, make the top & bottom margins tiny, change the font to something tolerable and export it.
No. I just set it to Continuous. See those four icons in the lower right corner? (assuming you've got a recent version) Play with those. You want the second button from the left
"This goes along with the concept that for an electronic format, I do NOT need a sentence (or even worse, hyphenated word) broken up by two inches of top and bottom margin filled with page numbers, miscellaneous watermarks, repetitive titles, etc."
Well, the whole purpose of PDF is to "preserve the look and integrity of your original documents
"very few new features come out"
Have you seen Google Earth?
How about the disaster wiki that went together in about 20 minutes, where people were posting status reports of New Orleans properties?
I think you're damning with faint praise. Google, at least, consistently builds superb offerings, and the price is right. Not quite sure what you're grousing about...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!