Google To Resume Scanning Books

SenseOfHumor writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will resume scanning copyrighted books from Stanford and Univ of Michigan libraries. Let the battle resume!" From the article: "It isn't known just what percentage of library holdings fall into the category of being in copyright but out of print. About 18% of the books held by the libraries working with Google were printed prior to 1923 and are therefore in the public domain, according to an analysis by the Online Computer Library Center, a Dublin, Ohio, nonprofit library cooperative. An unknown percentage of the rest still are protected by copyright, depending on whether it was renewed. Google's resumption of its scanning of copyrighted works comes amid heated debate in the library community over participation in the program."

Comments

I can not wait

[w.p.richardson]

until this is available! I can't count the number of times that I have been flipping thru a book and wished I could use the search function, only to realize that it doesn't work in meatspace. Searching is up to me, using old fashioned tools, like the table of contents or the index!

Good.

[Gothic_Walrus]

Books are fragile. They need to be preserved somehow.

Would Google be allowed to store scanned copies of books even if the authors opt out? Someday, those print copies are going to be destroyed or deteriorate to the point of uselessness, which means that Google could be archiving works that might otherwise be lost forever.

I still don't get the uproar over the scanning, because it's not like the entire book is made available for free. The search is so crippled that it makes me think the people who are upset have never used it before.

Hmm.

[daniil]

FTA: "I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at California State University, Fresno. "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue."

The sad thing is, scholarly texts are so abundant nowadays that it's neigh impossible to keep oneself current with all the new things published. Already there are magazines that only (or mostly) contain abstracts or reviews of new dissertations and articles. I fail to see how Google Print is a greater disaster than this. If anything, it'll only improve the situation.

Did I miss something?

[Descalzo]

Assuming Google won't make these scanned copies available to everyone to just read on their Palm Pilot, what is the big deal? I would think that it would be to the copyright owner's benefit to have their text in a database to be searched. If Google has my book in its database, and someone searches for text that happens to be included in my book, doesn't that make it more likely someone will buy it?

Seriously, though, I feel like I'm missing something here. What is it?

Book Tablets

[GoodOmens]

This will make those book tablets that never really sold a neat idea.

1.Connect to google.

2.Download a rare book only found in a handfull of libraries.

3.Go read it....

1923 - 1990: the gap years

[G4from128k]

The move to digitize out-of-copyright works combined with the natural movement of new materials to web creates a kind of internet information gap. Many things appearing after 1990 or so are now on the net in some form or other. And things that occurred before 1923 are in material now lapsed from copyright and will be on the net courtesy of Google. Things in between are too old to be on the net directly and too new to be out of copyright.

In 75 years, give or take, the gap will close for oldest years on. But for a while the internet will not have as much on a wide array content on pre-digital topics.

I love the fact

[gregbains]

Its great that a lot of the people opting out think this will save them, when all you need to do is visit local library and get entire book to read for free. Surely this is worse?

spread information

[dingDaShan]

I currently attend the University of Michigan, and have encountered much frustration in tracking down books. The university has several libraries and finding some books is nearly impossible. Additionally, the University has old collections and manuscripts that are barely indexed in the University's system. For the purposes of research, scanning the books is a dream come true. Searching for keywords, the ability to quickly find books, and the ability to view old manuscripts that one would normally need to be present at the library (and under supervision) to view. The copyright issue is important, but the books that are in public domain (primary sources especially) should definitely be scanned. As for the copyrighted books themselves, Google does not allow the full book to be viewed. If anything, Google advertises for these books. For a student such as myself, I would not buy the book as it is, so what is the harm?

Flaunt/Flout--From TFA

[adavies42]

Mr. Gorman, who said the American Library Association doesn't have an official position on the subject, described Google's argument that Web users will be able to look at several snippets and then decide whether they want to buy or read the book as "ridiculous." Further, he noted that as a published author, he opposes Google's intention to build an enormous database that includes copyrighted texts. "It's a flaunting of my intellectual property rights," he said. [emphasis added]

If the president of the American Library Association doesn't know the different between flaunt and flout, I think civilization is doomed.

Re:Lessig's Tough Call

[judmarc]

Why would Google care? You can make "Jamie Web Search" right now and Google has no right to stop you. Go ahead, index the Web. MS and Yahoo have, and Google isn't suing them. It isn't the *data* that's the secret sauce, it's the *search algorithm(s)*. The very same is true of Google Print.

The Kelly v. ArribaSoft argument

[Anonymous Coward]

One of Google's arguments is that a marvelous Ninth Circuit decision of a few years ago, one of the few to deal with Internet issues, gives them the right to do what they're doing. But Kelly v. ArribaSoft is a weak reed to rest Google Print's case on. True, there are parallels. The thumbnails of art and photos that Arriba was indexing and posting as the case went to trial are like the short excerpts that Google Print will use and the helpful Ariba quickly complied with opt-out requests, including those by the ill-tempered Kelly who sued.

Both the district and appeals courts stressed the service that Arriba was providing to everyone by linking to web sites where an artist/photographer had made his art available online. The thumbnail itself, the court noted, was of such poor quality as to be of no value, something that isn't always true of a quote. (And one of the worst ways to treat an author is to quote them out-of-context, a practice Google's scheme will encourage.) The artist/photographer had also chosen to post his work online, thus putting it on the market. The Arriba link took interested parties to a site where they could pay the artist/photographer for the rights to a usable image. Arriba was creating a win/win situation for everyone and, once the image was thumbnailed, the full version no longer existed at Arriba's web site. All those factors taken together were sufficient to make what ArribaSoft was doing legal.

But the Ariba/Google parallel only exists for books that are in print, being marketed online, and paying royalties to the copyright holder. Out of print, books that are only available used or through libraries do not parallel the AribaSoft case. What Google is much more like sending someone with a digital camera to art galleries and museums, ignoring any wishes of the artist. Owning a copy isn't owning the copyright. That's why the "approval" Google has from the libraries is so silly, as are its claims that it is simply making a 'really big' card catalog.

The reader may benefit. Google and whoever profits from Google's linking may benefit, but no royalties flow to the author due to the linking, nor has the author chosen (present tense) to place the book online or in the marketplace. He may, in fact, consider the earlier work so dreadful, he intends to use copyright laws to their full extent to keep down his embarassment. And despite the squawks of some posting here, we have no legal right to get easy access to what someone else has published. A copyright bestows the right to say, "No more copies will be published." That's why, for instance, an author can prevent anyone from making a movie derivative.

Arriba is a marvelous case for defending unauthorized linking and for indexing the web itself, as Google does. And as a Ninth Circuit appeals decision for someone living in the Ninth Circuit, it was "controlling" in my successful battle with Tolkien estate lawyers over whether my chronology of a fictional work was fair use--the law in that matter having been corrupted by some dreadful Second Circuit court actions in 1998.

But Arriba is weak precisely where Google is being challenged most strongly by authors and publishers--Google's right to scan and index the entire text of books that are in library collections but are, for the most part, are out of print. For those books, Google cannot link to a website where the purchase of the book will result in income for the copyright holder. That's the key issue. Google Print may be a winning situation for Google and readers, but the copyright holder doesn't get a cent. Indeed, the very point of Google's action is to blast ahead, not bothering to even look for authors because that would be too much trouble. Authors, on the other hand, are expected to go to the enormous trouble of tracking down every instance of the use of their material by Google and a thousand Google-clones, and opt-out of each individually.

And I might add that I say this as a "one Mac mini" author/editor/publisher who's placed virtually every