Slashdot Mirror
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."
Someone start up a "Open Content Alliance" for music... then we can digitize and share it all we want.
I can't wait to read the whole book on one page.
I liked the idea the first time I heard it - back when it was called Project Gutenburg. :P
...that we don't?
It seems to me that they're throwing money at an unnecessary application. Does Yahoo know something that we don't? I'd venture that they're starting with PD books to shake the bugs out of their platform so the app works well in round 2.
Round 2 (current commercial books) won't occur without a massive copyright law change or support of the Author's Guild.
Hmm.
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.
I hate to see a University pander to commercial interests, while at the same time, welcome commercial interests such as Yahoo. Money talks, and I'm sure UC is being paid a lot, but libraries are supposed to be public resources too, not exclusive profit-centers :-(.
Now this is a right step towards making book contents searcheable online. I will hate to see one company like Google copying and caching all books in its massive cluster of servers. I know that Google kool-aid that "we are about general good" is running deeply in the veins of slashdot types.
Since when was scanning books from libraries and making them available to public for a profit was considered "fair use"? This kind of stuff is done by pirates. Go to the major cities in China and India and you will see piles of copied book in the streets all sold for 1/10th the original price without giving anything back to the authors. The pirates can say that they are doing a favor to the authors by driving them out of obscurity.
The message the alliance is sending out to the authors is
- we are not for profit
- we will scan your book only if you want us to do so
- your book will be indexed based on your approval and copyright agreement with you and the publishers
Compare this to what Google is telling the authors- we will scan your book, fill a form and tell us if you don't want us to do so
- we will take sale comissions from amazon, buy.com, bn.com, etc. without sharing anything with you
- if we show ads, we will share the profits with you
- we will show excerpts of your book, so if a researcher is researching on a topic he can find what you have written about a topic without ever having to buy your book, too bad, heh heh, write a fiction book dude
- we will cache your book in our servers and only we will reserve the right to profit from your scanned book
So much for do no evil. Kudos to yahoo for bringing the open content alliance, gutenberg, and other similar projects to limelight - these are some really nice collections that were hidden by the noise created by 'google print'.