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?