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.'"

Comments

Danger to publishers?

[null etc.]

It's interesting whenever I hear publishers crying out about Google's plans to digitize books. Invariably, Google says something like "hey this is good, this can help sell eclectic books!" and then everyone wonders what the fuss is, and why are publishers getting their panties in a bunch?

One important fact that's overlooked, though, is that if Google has digital copies of all those pieces of works, that "digital database" could be stolen or comprimised. If that were to happen, publishers could never totally eradicate all the stolen books that would be floating around on the Internet or dark nets.

Furthermore, it's possible that technical weaknesses in Google's online book search implementation might be used to reconstruct the entire book. For example, search for what you know to be the first sentence in a book. When Google returns an excerpt with the second, third, and fourth sentence, then just do another search for the fourth sentence, and Google will return an excerpt with the fifth, sixth, seventh sentence, etc. I'm not claiming that's how Google's search feature will work; I'm merely presenting the possibility that technical weaknesses might be exploited to the detriment of the publishing industry.

Re:Danger to publishers?

[east coast]

When Google returns an excerpt with the second, third, and fourth sentence, then just do another search for the fourth sentence, and Google will return an excerpt with the fifth, sixth, seventh sentence, etc.

Why not just go to B&N or Borders and read the book at that rate? I'm sure someone who is willing to go thru the pains of reading a book in that fashion would never actually buy the book. Who would invest this kind of time and effort into reading a book when they can just do it the traditional way and fork out a couple of bucks and save themselves the agro?

This is also like saying I can goto my local bookstore and write down the contents of a book in a notebook, thus robbing the author of hard earned cash... but think about it, you go to copy a 20 dollar book, spend 10 dollars on notepads and about 50 hours to actually do it... who the hell is going to do that?

Re:Danger to publishers?

[Taladar]

The real difference is the mode of consumption. You have no difference between watching a copied or an original movie on your PC monitor or TV but there is a big difference between reading a book on paper or reading it on the screen. The only people that should have those worries are those producing pure reference books that are never read but only used to find specific information but those have problems in times of Google anyway.

Re:Danger to publishers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking about doing something just like that for a _long_ time. With Amazon's Look Inside the Book technology.

Simple, really. Grab the first few pages (i.e. the jpg files) until it tells you you can't go on. Then search for the last word on that page (the page you stopped at), go to that page, then continue on for a few more pages. Once you have them all, compile into an eBook and put up a torrent. All automated.

Add some autodiscovery of books code, let it run for a few months, maybe add some proxy code so they don't see repeated requests from the same IP, and woo, you own all books on Amazon that have Look Inside! (In eBook format)

Similar things could be done with Google Print, easily.

Now if college apps would just finish themselves, I could start working on all these cool projects I have floating around... *sigh*.

Re:Danger to publishers?

[SeaFox]

If that were to happen, publishers could never totally eradicate all the stolen books that would be floating around on the Internet or dark nets.

They can't do that anyway. Someone could just as easily transcribe/OCR the book into an etext. We don't need Google to steal the world's literature for us, we can manage it just fine on our own.

Once it's in digital form, it can never be completely eradicated. There will always be someone on a P2P network or with an FTP server or an Angelfire page with the file available if it's in demand.

It's like the RIAA/MPAA trying to stop piracy, the ony way to gaurantee no one steals your work is not to allow anyone access to it to begin with.

How do we sign on to Googles version?

[Safe Sex Goddess]

I like Google's version better. How do we sign on as supporters to their version of the project? Do they have something set up already for local public and school libraries to be able to use? That seems like one way that they could get a lot of endorsements and awareness from the public about what they're doing.

Parallels!

[mister_llah]

USSR -- US ... Cold War...

Yahoo -- Google ... Search Engine Cold War!

===

Seems to be a game of 'who can do the most and seem the coolest'...

This is simultaneously good and bad for everyone... (kind of like the Cold War)

A total gem from a related article...

[Maqueo]

Quoted from "Microsoft to offer book search":

"Principally and philosophically, we are aligning with the notion that intellectual property should not be proprietarily owned by any commercial company," Tiedt (MSN manager) said.

Sunny Day!

[EraserMouseMan]

I grew up in a beach resort. You could walk into any grocery store and pick up a free booklet titled Sunny Day. There would be helpful maps, tips for tourists and cool coupons.

So was everybody walking around talking about how Sunny Day is so good for humanity and is a beacon of light in a greedy world? No. Everybody knew that Sunny Day was making money on the publication. That's why they put out the booklet. If they couldn't make money on it anymore, guess what? No more free maps. No more free coupons.

Google is just a big Sunny Day. They want to make money. They think free maps are cool, sure. But if free maps, free email, freely searchable books, free internet searching, etc. didn't contribute to advertizing dollars anymore they'd probably put those on the back burner and work on other projects that made Google richer.

MS wants more money and so does Google. Google just gives away free stuff.

Re:this must frost google's OO

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It looks like another nail in the Google Print Coffin. Author's Guild and AAP both suing.

OK. They have been sued over their regular page indexing as well, but that did not end google searching. Google has the legal precedent here and seems likely to prevail.

Can we add this to the growing list of projects that Google has released that just haven't panned out, dare I say flopped? Google Search appliance, Google Web Accelerator, GTalk, Google Reader, Personalized Search, Google Ride Finder, Google Personalized Home Page, ummm... yes we can add it, Google Print. LOL.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Google search appliances do good business. Plenty of places buy them to index their internal networks. Gtalk? It has barely entered beta and you call it a flop? You know what? Some Parkinsons researchers I know were just commenting the other day how useful google scholar is and how they use it all the time. They had not heard of Google books yet, but all of them were interested when I mentioned it. Google has dozens of projects going, mostly just to test the waters and a lot of them end up integrated into google search. I know I use it for research. Maybe you should get a clue. These things may not be really popular, but they are profitable and useful and people use a lot of them every day. Speculating that legal action will kill a project is all well and good, but it would be even better if you had a clue about the subject or had read the laws and precedent setting cases before making said uninformed speculations.