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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 obviously a MS conspiracy to "digitize" all forms of print media, thereby making paper irrelavent, and thus create a lack of work in the pulp industry, which will reduce deforrestation, and unemployed loggers will have to work in salt mines that Bil Gates owns. The miners will need to sign up on Yahoo Messenger, but they won't realize that Y! is merging protocols with MSN Messenger next year, and since they already have MSN passports they'll have duplicate identities. They'll forget to use one of the identities, so that Microsoft clones can take over their unused identity, and thuse a clone army will be born to crush Google.
And you thought it was a simple effort to make it easier to access print resources online! Ha!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
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
The internet archive has been involved with this for more than 8 years. Amazon also has had the search inside the book for longer than Google has been running google print.