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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.'"
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.
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