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Open Library Goes Online With Public Domain Books
mrcgran writes "A competitor to Google Book Search emerges as the Yahoo-backed Open Content Alliance launches an 'open library' of its own. After several years of scanning and archiving, the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance this week unveiled the Open Library, their attempt at bringing public domain books to the masses. The Internet Archive has hosted texts for quite some time, but the Open Library makes fully-searchable, high-quality scans of books available, along with downloadable PDFs. It offers an experience designed to match paper: there's even a page-flipping animation as readers move forward and backward through the book. Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that when it comes to presentation, 'they already have Google beat, even with recent upgrades to the [Google Book Search] system including a plain text viewing option.'" We have previously discussed this project, though this is a bit more complete rundown on the initiative.
Have they solved the actual problems that plague online book sites? You know, lack of portability, bulkiness, ability to read on the toilet easily, and the ability to lend to friends at the drop of a hat? Are those solved yet?
Yes, very nice and all, but, how will they get new works? It's not like anything is entering public domain anymore.
Where I can donate my real books to a library and they'll happily accept them, I can't donate anything to Open Library unless I own the full copyrights.
More Twoson than Cupertino
The more, the merrier!
I can't wait until all printed books have been scanned into public sites. I'm really into arcane mythology and religion and it is very hard to find original sources, and when you do you can't even check them out because they are so old!
"There's even a page-flipping animation"
That's it, I'm sold now.
It has been said that 63% of all statistics are made up
Project Gutenberg has been in the business of hosting public domain books and other literary works for many years, long before either Google or this new thing. Gutenberg is much more of an "Open Source" project in that it is more distributed to volunteers. I wonder if there has been any coordiation between Gutenberg and these "big boy" projects?
Project Gutenberg
FTFA: It offers an experience designed to match paper: there's even a page-flipping animation as readers move forward and backward through the book.
I'm skeptical about the usefulness of that. There's nothing I hate more than having to wait for some animation before I can read more content.
these will be quick reads.
They didn't mention the demo site - check out the About the technology page for a summary of ThingDB their new database framework - "a database that could hold tens of millions of records, that would allow random users to modify its entries and keep a full history of their changes, and that would hold arbitrary semi-structured data as users added it. Each of these problems had been solved on its own, but nobody had yet built a technology that solved all three together."
A few months ago, I attended a discussion forum at the University of Rochester that brought in a few well-established people from various professions in and related to the publications of books. The main topic they discussed was how new technology will affect the way books ultimately reach the readers. They talked about things like print-to-order books and walking around with eBooks on your portable computer as well as an online database of books that people can simple go to and read whatever is there. More questions were raised than answers given, but one conclusion that everybody there seemed to be happy to agree with was that printed texts are not going anywhere. They've been around longer than just about any other technology that is still used on a daily basis by millions of people. They'll be here tomorrow, next year, next decade, and I would be next century (unless we all kill ourselves by then). The next question has to do with their popularity. Surely, people would prefer to carry around a small 2-pound computer that can store hundreds of books than literally carrying around those hundreds of books. So at some point there is a shift in preference. I think that the answer of where exactly is that shift is still anybody's guess. Time will tell, to be sure.
Somewhere between a super nerd and a rock star...
Unless it has changed recently, isn't whitehouse.org a site that is NSFW? Oh, you silly little troll, you almost got me. Almost.
Gutenberg is the actual text of the book, this is the scan of the orginal print.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
You're thinking of whitehouse.com. Whitehouse.org is a parody site, last time I checked.
I'm usually not a fan of on-line things trying to faithfully mimic their real-world counterparts. Interface designers do it because they're convinced that their users will be able to seamlessly transfer their real-world skills into using their on-line application, but most of the time the artificial restrictions that are imposed in order to stay faithful to the metaphor limit the actual usefulness of the application.
That said, I kind of like this, page-turning animation and all.
Maybe it's because it's intended to display scans of actual books, and so having them mimic the actual books they're based on makes sense. Plus the addition of search capability is something that a real book doesn't have, but it uses the tools available as an on-line application. I also like the subtle things, like the thickness of the pages on either side changing, so you can judge your position in the book, and the little tabs that help you find your search terms.
It's making me re-think my stance on real-world metaphors in an on-line setting.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Page-flipping animations are a complete waste of time. Gimmicky interfaces are rarely good interfaces.
Four easy steps to fix the small selection and lack of money for copyright puchase:
1. Offer a small selection of books to the world.
2. Let the world download them for free, after accepting a small EULA and logging in.
3. Write a small "If you don't upload a new book to the archive within 4 weeks, fines will be placed on your account." clause into the Terms and Conditions of the website.
4. Profit!!!
In other words, the group trying to tie up Google in the courts is off doing something very similar on it's own. Typical outcomes for such efforts is to plod along offering competition to the product being litigated and in the process try to make the venture unprofitable for the target organization. Once case is settle out of court (or in) competing product is dropped like a hot potato.
Why would ANYONE trust Yahoo, MSN, HP or Adobe with content of any kind?
I fail to see what is wrong with the Google approach: I can search on content with strings. If the found content is not under copyright I have full access to it right away. If the found content is still under copyright I can at least verify that it actually covers the topic I'm interested in (as opposed to just containing a word or two in the glossary) and I can then procede to order the book, go to my public library, or whatever I need to do to get the information.
I love Project Gutenberg and the like, but considering the players involved this thing stinks to high heaven.
Of course Google could just make it easy on themselves and pull the plug on their efforts right now. Let these bandwagoneers do the heavy lifting and just provide searches on it all (which they are likely to do in any event).
My guess is though that this group will disband about a day after Google stops scanning.
We WILL get fooled again!
Brewster (IA) and Raj Reddy (CMU) and others have been working on this for almost a decade now, the Internet Archive bookmobile has been printing/binding books on demand at schools across the world for more than 5 years. They actually approached google about joining them before google launched their own project. While Brewster has made attempts to overturn the Sonny Bono copyright extension law (a couple made it to the supreme court, but ultimately failed), he generally doesn't like to push the envelope when it comes to copyright infringement, so much so that he has been accused of being a patsy. Which is really sad, as he has spent a whole lot of his own money and hours making more data freely available than probably anyone in the history of man!
Having page turning animations is just silly. It makes about as much sense as raggedly tearing the edges of books or rolling up the pages to make them look more like scrolls. The point of putting books online is so people can read them not to foist irrelevant and distracting visuals from the physical world onto electronic books. If this was merely a waste of time I wouldn't mind so much but given the poor responsiveness of browser animations for many people this seems like a distraction to serious reading.
I don't deny that physical metaphors are a necessary and powerful way to organize human computer interactions. The trash can metaphor is a great way to communicate how the non-immediate delete facility works. However, if a metaphor is good people don't need to be hit over the head with silly animations emphasizing the point.
Just imagine if the default setting for windows or mac was to have a little garbage truck roll across your screen and pick up your trash (or recycling) every time you emptied it! Or suppose moving files around in folders was accompanied by sounds and images of rustling paper. It would be cute the first time you saw it but would quickly become pretty horrible.
I guess I wouldn't even be making this post if I didn't already have the feeling (true or not) that this project (or at least the funding..I don't doubt the volunteers have nobler intentions) is as much about sticking it to google as it is about helping people get information and read books online for free. A feature like this that seems harmful to reading but makes people go 'ohh cool' just reinforces that impression for me.
Probably I'm just being silly (don't read anything deep into my bias) but that's what it feels like for what it's worth.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
iim readong slashdit on the toieltt right now. it's a bitch to balanxe my laptup on my knee or in my handd while typing.
what i want to se is toilet papeer with elentonic ink. my TP roll would serve as an rss fed and I can wipe my ass with slashdot dupes.
Does it support licensing options for books that author's want to keep some control over? For instance, can a work that is Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs be posted there?
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This is so telling, a whole lot of free information, classic books, many of the best ever written, are made available completely free, in an easy form and comment #2 is bitching about not having access to recent text. You could also write to your favorite authors and ask them to donate their texts. Instead you demand that artists and authors provide you with free entertainment. Maybe you should spend a year of your life writing a book, and providing it to the world for free. Or do as Rick Prellinger (Moving Picture Archive) did, and buy the copyrights and provide them for free.
check out http://book-bot.com/ - it's an online book reading site as well but you can double click a word and get it defined for you on the spot. show me a paper book that does that! there's also an OS X dashboard widget for it http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference /bookbotcomreader.html
The same way I don't want my parchment to reproduce the feel of letters chisled in stone or my book to reproduce the crinkled, rolled scrolls. Pick a way to present the material that plays to the strengths of the medium and avoids the weaknesses. Spend your time optimizing books for easy searching and display on laptop screens not reproducing an interface that works well for paper. It's not just pointless reproduction of the past it's actually a bad interface for reading on the computer.
A book has the wonderful property that it is easy to flip back and forth between pages. It's easy to estimate where you are/were in a book by the thickness of the remaining pages in your hand. You can perform what amounts to a binary search for a specific page with minimum of fuss. None of these are yet true with books displayed on a computer. However, computers can search the entire book in an instant, combine complex boolean expressions and display snippets from each result. A good book interface should play to these strengths.
Unfortunatly this interface doesn't manage to do this. While quite pretty the page animations make flipping through pages quickly even harder than normal on a computer. The search interface doesn't let you see all the results at once nor do I see any options for a more complex kind of search. However, I really like the tabs on the side of the book that give a sense of where in the book the results are located. That should just be combined with a flat list of results.
Of course reasons of cost and time mean that it is easier to present books in their original form but in 10-15 years this is going to look as silly as the early cars that offered reins instead of steering wheels.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
"We have previously discussed this project, though this is a bit more complete rundown on the initiative."
Congratulations on the world's first publicly disclosed open source dupe!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
All I get is blank pages with a few non-working links. But then I only turn on scripting for kiddie sites and porn sites.
Why must I turn on javascript to read a book? I assume that it has something to do with lawyers and IP matters, but I hope someone can explain another reason that plain old HTML or text won't work. Deep inside I suspect that like many other content sites (YooToub) you can upload all you want, but you can't download.
Gutenberg has always suited me. Books I want to read don't have pictures anyway.
and "you can check out any time, but you can never leave..."
...omphaloskepsis often...
The current US laws have extended the existing copyright to 95 years after copyright registration, and 1923 is the first year that is not currently public domain, so we only have to wait 12 years, not 60, assuming the Mouse is unable to buy enough votes in Congress again.
Other countries have death+50 or death+70 copyright term laws, so they have new works becoming public domain every year. There are some Project Gutenberg affiliates in these countries, so they have books that can't be hosted by Project Gutenberg because they are still under copyright in the US. Maybe the OpenLibrary will do the same thing.
If your web site uses captcha, you get spam from posting your email address online, or you just want to help out the Internet Archive's book project, check out recaptcha. It's a captcha based around helping recognize difficult-to-OCR scans.
-snarkbot
I went there http://www.openlibrary.org/toc.html. All I can see is maybe 20 book covers, most of them too small to read. There's no search tab or way to search the entire library (which AFAIK could be only 20 books anyway). The 'Table of Contents' tab is a list of sponsors, not books. There is a link to upload books, but that's it. This is how *not* to design a web site. If this is all they have, forget it. If this is a 20 book technology demonstrator, they're about to learn the 'Marimba' lesson: You only get one chance.
You'll do far better with Project Guttenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page has thousands of books, and (WOW!) the ability to search by author or title. If only OpenLibrary.org had thought of that...
Choosing a book from the welcome page is equivalent to browsing a book shelf with extreme myopia and no glasses. Scans are too small and too aliased to read comfortably (OK, magnify is "coming soon"). The book takes up only 1/4 of the available space at 1280x1024, there is no fullscreen or single-page mode. The browsing buttons are so hard to hit that it gives me fitts'. There is no autoscroll/autobrowse. PDF/Djvu download, the single most important function (who wants to spend hours in front of a desktop computer when you can read it on your handheld with a better interface?), is hidden away under "Print" - completely unrelated. No listings, only one field for non-interactive search with a button that says "Go" instead of "Find"? You must be kidding. I would happily trade that cheesy page-flipping animation for a fix to any of these basic design flaws.
Which site are you talking about? www.openlibrary.org is a horrible website with no real content or user interface. The demo.openlibrary.org looks quite a bit better but the color scheme makes it look washed out (hard on the eyes) and it still doesn't have the majority of UI elements users expect in the places users expect. It's been my experience that if you don't give users the UI they expect then usually they won't give your website a long enough look for them to discover any of the good stuff on it.
Actually browsing the books isn't bad but the rest of the sites look like they need some major work and user testing.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.