Google Book Scanning Efforts Not Open Enough?

An anonymous reader writes to mention the Washington Post is reporting that the Open Content Alliance is taking the latest shot at Google's book scanning program. Complaining that having all of the books under the "control" of one corporation wouldn't be open enough, the New York-based foundation is planning on announcing a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive to achieve the same end. From the article: "A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind's accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it's a company like Google that has embraced 'Don't Be Evil' as its creed. 'You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it,' said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."

Comments

Re:Just Open Source It?

[SatanicPuppy]

I bet they won't.

There is nothing sexy or secret about the methods of scanning, but they must have put an imperial frickton of money into the process...To give the fruit of that much money away would be irresponsible to their shareholders...At least until they've made their money back with it.

Re:Google's goof

[DragonWriter]

Part of the fallout from the lawsuit has been that Google has done everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists.

Its on the short list "More" link on the Google search page, and results from it are brought up without special request for certain searches on the main web search engine (apparently, any with the word "book" that get hits, though I'm not certain of that.)

That's hardly Google doing "everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists".

Project Gutenburg

[larry bagina]

I'm a kind of baffled why people are talking about starting up new projects or Open Sourcing (tm) google's prject (whatever that means...).

Project Gutenburg is open and non proprietary (ASCII text) and has been for quite a while.

After scanning, they use a distributed proofreading system where volunteers compare a scanned page image to the OCR text for errors. If you've got some free time, consider helping out.