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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."
Reading between the lines for this proposal we seem to have another print.google.com, except it will not index a huge number of works whose copyright holders do not "opt in" to the program. The advantage to this is that it may make some copyright holders feel better about the whole thing and, hopefully submit entire works to be viewed by the public. It is also possible that Yahoo is worried about the legal issues and want to wait and see how google weathers any legal challenges.
From a purely technical perspective, this system seems inferior in most ways. It only displays full text and does not give copyright authors the ability to show only an excerpt, or a set number of pages. Although, providing them as PDFs is nice. I wish Google would add that feature for works that are shown in their entirety. In general though, if I'm looking for particular data I don't see why I'd use yahoo which will have a much smaller index of work.