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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.
Don't worry about paying for old news on Slashdot, it gets reposted every two weeks!!
As for me, that's what I go to the dentist for. Apparently Richard Nixon has resigned! And Car and Driver has pictures of the new Gremlin!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
TFA is old news. The service is already launched here: http://news.google.com/archivesearch
v e-search/
Web Owls (a group blog by some Google Answers researchers) has a piece about it: http://web-owls.com/2006/09/06/googles-news-archi
Paid Q&A/Research
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
But, as what happens to other sites that have a "paid version" of an article, will Google still cache the full version?
I do google searches all the time that result in my ending up on a site that wants to charge me to read the article. I hit the back button and click on Google's cached copy and read the whole thing just fine without paying a dime.
That would make my day just a little brighter if Google ends up caching their own paid content.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
As I understand it, when a full text content provider republishes copyright-free works, they copyright their newly bundled publication. So I can't, say, go in to ProQuest Historical Newspapers and download everything and host it providing free access. Further reproduction is prohibited. (But how you can prove you took *their* republished text is another issue I suppose.)
It's why a search for "Alice in Wonderland" in Google Books gets you only a few pages, while Project Gutenberg delivers the whole text. The books in Google (for the copyright-free text) are for copyrighted books (or presentations, rather).
A lot of organizations have made money off of reproducing copyright-free materials. You can reprint government documents (US federal ones are usually copyright-free) and re-sell them, for example. The publisher of the 9-11 report (available freely online, not that it was widely advertised as such) got a real "royalty-free windfall" from the bestseller.
Reading between the lines of TFA, it's not Google that will scan old news. Real newspaper will do the scanning, but those newspaper will open the otherwise paying-for service for Google to indexing. Then (simplifying a little) Google will point you to the paying service, or - acting as a proxy - collect the fee for smaller newspapers.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Google is not scanning anything. It is merely providing a deep-web metasearch for pre-existing databases such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale. These are, for the most part, pay services that until now had to be searched separately. For people like me (a lexicographer) this is great news because it will shave many minutes off of each work day. Now, if they'd also make them affordable to independent scholars...
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
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.
That's because there's an existing valid copyright on that recording of that orchestra's performance of the piece. If you rip an out-of-copyright 78 or wax cylinder recording, or record your own performance on kazoo, you can share to your heart's content.