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.

14 Libraries and Microsoft Joined Last Night

[brewsterkahle]

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)

Blog Post from Open Library Programmer

[BradNeuberg]

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:

http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/10/introdu cing-open-library-and-ajax.html

Check it out.

Brad Neuberg

You can pin that one on google.

[MushMouth]

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.