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Google to Sell Old News Articles
Krishna Dagli was one of a few people to note that Google is planning on selling old news. Or more accurately, scanning in 200 years of old newspapers, and selling people the ability to view the full text. They'll be using publications like the NYT and Time magazine. Summaries will be free, but the full article text will have a price.
While others note that in some cases the information Google seeks to sell may be available somewhere on the net for free, time searching for it is not free. Serious researchers or people who are just plain impatient, will gladly pay for the convenience of one stop shopping from a source they trust. As for the newspapers, a number of them already have paid archive access services, but any arrangement with Google is likely to net them more business and more money without too much more effort.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Sure it's the same service.
TFA makes it clear that the news site is the one charging for the old articles, and that the news site does not share the revenue with Google. Google just provides the search (and they organise it very nicely into a timeline too).
Paid Q&A/Research
Good luck entering a search term into a microfiche machine.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I've worked in libraries. I've even worked specifically in the periodicals / microstorage area.
Yes, libraries have the New York Times and whatever else, back a hundred or so years, on microfilm or microfiche. This is all well and good. However, the available indices may not offer full-text searches, and even if they do, they're limited to certain publications or sets of publications. Additionally, microfiche's random access capability isn't all that great, and microfilm's is nonexistent.
If Google links data from a bunch of other indices, so that I can do one search, get a bunch of different results, and then decide whether to go to the library and print copies from microstorage for a small cost per page, or simply buy an electronic "reprint" and save it as a PDF, that's better than what I had before.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The more sources of history the better; at your finger tips - perfect! In today's United States of Amnesia, old news could be useful. For example, one could read all about how a Government did a witchhunt for groups of individuals it deemed to be unAmnesian and persecuted them.
Or wait... is that new news...?
History in the making is helpful in not forgetting some of the atrocities of the past. It seems that many Americans have forgotten McCarthy, many Germans are again not interested in the rise of the nazis in their midst, and many more examples all over the world...
Old Fox News however... is just as worthless yesterday as today as tomorrow.
Why is no one able to get article summaries right anymore? Slashdot should pay people to fix everyone's mistakes.
Google has no intention of selling anything. The bloody article itself says so. They are going to provide links where you can buy it from the original publisher, many of which sell old news articles. They're not even going to make any money from the service right now. I just tried a few searches, and on every single one, it sends me to the original publishers' site, where I can purchase access to the article.
This site is going downhill.... More and more illiterates seem to be coming here everyday.