Google Working To Make 'iPod/iTunes for Books'

nettamere writes to mention an initiative by Google to take the library online. The end result of the Google Book Search, the company hopes to see a future where they are not merely referring customers to Amazon, but instead offering them the ability to download books directly. According to the Times Online, Google hopes to 'do for books what the iPod did for music.' From the article: "One of Google's partners, Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, said he foresaw a number of categories becoming popular downloads: 'Do you really want to go on holiday carrying four novels and a guide book?' The book initiative would be part of Google's Book Search service and its partnership with publishers, which will make books searchable online with publishers' approval. At present, only a sample of each book is available online."

Comments

Re:How would one install the books?

[tomhudson]

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

Re:Bad article

[squiggleslash]

I guess he means fair use, not fair dealing. I'm not sure why he thinks Google is paying for music. This is news to me ...

No, he means fair dealing. Fair use is an American concept. It is foreign to Britain. As far as Google paying for music and movies, I'm not really sure what that's a reference to.

The ability to quote or use small parts of a work as fair use has always been there as far as I know. This is a new way to use it, that's all. Is this post a looming intellectual property issue now?

Again, no, not in British copyright law. In British copyright law a very small amount of a text can be copied for certain limited purposes. There is no blanket right, "fair use" or otherwise, to quote or use small parts of a work. In the US, there similarly is no blanket right, though the conditions under which you can use an extract from a work are certainly wider, if less well defined.

Given that the author points out elsewhere that the American libraries are the first to allow digitization of copyrighted books, I'm not sure why he is surprised by this.

Perhaps he isn't. Perhaps he's making an unrelated point about the consequences of this.

I don't even know what to make of this paragraph. The net doesn't educate? Teachers will dictate how we read books in the future? If students only read books for information, we're doomed? It seems like a random collection of ideas that aren't backed up with logical argument, but exists only to give a punchy ending paragraph.

So your final piece of evidence that this British publication doesn't know about the American legal system that it is not writing about is a difference in opinion about the rhetorical ending.

Ever notice when you read a comment about an article from a culture and jurisdiction you know something about, the comment is always riddled with false assumptions and erroneous nitpicking? This comment made me think of that. In my not so humble opinion, this is just really, really, bad, parochial, writing.

LIbrary already have this

[majortom1981]

I can already take out a book and read it on my computer from my local lirbary. what makes this so special? I know I am the network tech who gets questions from patrons on how to do it. I mean that the book is an electronic copy.

Re:The hardware is there, just

[kalidasa]

*As a device*, I love my Sony Reader. When I can find a good copy of a good book in a format that works with the software, it's a very pleasant experience (and yes, I do bring it into the bathroom, though not into the tub - but then I would never bring a paperback into the tub, either). Unfortunately, the Connect software is so bad that it makes it pretty damned hard to get the kind of use out of it I would prefer. The Connect bookstore is atrocious: I'd say as much as 10% of the books are mis-categorized (since when is St. Augustine's *City of God* "Contemporary Fiction?"), the selection is terrible (10,000 books? That's about the size of a little airport bookstore - and like the airport bookstore, there are multiple copies of some books), the interface is frustrating (nothing like having two scroll bars, and why do ebookstores insist on listing only 10 books per page - well, probably so it will seem like they have a bigger selection), and the quality is very uneven. Converting anything other than an RTF is irritating - for text, Connect can't figure out when it should run lines together and when it should preserve line breaks, and it doesn't ask, and PDFs are simply scaled rather than being reflowed, so most of my PDFs (like O'Reilly books) aren't readable unless I go through a laborious cut-and-paste process or find some software of dubious legality to decrypt them). There's no mechanism for updating fonts (sure, I could hack into the machine, which runs a Linux, and add them myself, but I don't have time for that), and I need to keep a Windows VM for the Connect software (which looks so bad it might as well have been written in Swing and at least been cross-platform). Finally, there's no commercially available software for formatting your own books, except for a Japanese program sold by Canon for the Librie and a bunch of mediocre freeware that never quite does a good enough job.