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Microsoft Joins Yahoo! Book Search Plan
tanman writes "The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has signed on to 'work with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), set up by the Internet Archive, to initially put 150,000 works online. The move comes as Google faces growing legal pressure from publishers over its own global digital library plans.'"
www.openlibrary.org is the website for content of the Open Content Alliance.
Since you obviously missed the previous article, Yahoo Competes with Google in Book Scanning.
The open content alliance is the answer to Google print which in large part was pushed to fruition by Yahoo! The major difference here is this plan only puts books in their index which have HAD approval by the authors/publishers. Google has said that this won't work because most of the work out there would be passed up and never get put online. For more information about Google Print check out http://print.google.com/intl/en/googleprint/about. html
At this time, Google is working with the following librarys: University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, and Oxford University.
This is an Opt-In system compared to googles Opt-Out deal. Google should follow MSN and Yahoo on this one. If you look at the contributors this could really go strong.
Google's service is called Google Print ( print.google.com ) and it's intended to digitize ALL available printed works. Although currently they're only doing a select few libraries.
Yahoo (and now MS it seems) is limiting it's project to digitizing works in the public domain, and works that have been authorized.
So, they've both got projects in the works, albeit with different scopes and intents.
The press has concentrated on Microsoft's joining which is fantastic, but we also had 14 key libraries join which is also great news.
http://www.opencontentalliance.org is a good site for this stuff.
Something I am jazzed about is a cool bookviewer at http://www.openlibrary.org/ showing the first books from University of California sponsored by Yahoo! and the "vision book" there tells the story of what we envision and some of the announcements.
onward!
-brewster Digital Librarian Internet Archive (administers the Open Content Alliance)
As far as I understand it, Google is merely indexing the works, so one could locate a book, and would then be able to get it from somewhere else. This (Microsoft) idea is to actually make the full texts available. Both services are useful, but they are very certainly two different services.
A) I don't see that as a leak of that size as a likely scenario. That much data doesn't escape by accident.
B) Oh what a nightmare if it did and we had an electronic backup of every book in existence...
The fact is that copyright infringement of books is already easy. All it takes is an automatic document feeder and a good PDF generator. $500.
It's happening and it will continue to happen. But Google is acting very responsibly so the publishers are better off with them than leaving users to their own creative pursuits.
I seriously doubt that illegal trading of music would be so big if iTunes or something like it had been around from the beginning. But the industry couldn't get their act together.
-- John.
I'm one of the software engineers who worked on the Open Library's Flipbook viewer. I just put up a blog post with further technical details on what we have done here:
u cing-open-library-and-ajax.html
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/10/introd
Check it out.
Brad Neuberg
If you use Google you're not in an "buying mind". And then you have Amazon, an online store. I guess that's why.
Thing is, if I understand Google's goals correctly, they don't want to display the whole book online, they want to index the content to show in their search results - that way anyone in a 'buying mind' will be able to get a list of books that fit their topic. Bottom line is fair use is fair use. Either Amazon is violating copyrights, has an agreement with the publishers that allow them to show exerpts or they fall under the fair use provisions that Google claims they fall under.
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