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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.
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
Well, since they allow you to download PDFs of the books, I'd say they've probably solved these problems just about as well as could be done without first mailing a free eBook reader to every person on Earth.
Page-flipping animations are a complete waste of time. Gimmicky interfaces are rarely good interfaces.
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!
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.
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:
Did you try it? If so, fine.
If not....pick one and go read a few pages. The page turning ani does not get in the way, nor is it hitting you over the head. Click/flip. Since this is a scan of the actual book, the animation pretty well represents the actual feel of the book. Or as close as you can get onscreen. I've tried reading books on the computer that were mere straight text copies, and this feels far better. (Not that I like reading novels tied to the computer)
unless you have one very, very, very long page full of text, at some point you have to click 'Next'. Might as well recreate the feel of a book as much as possible.
And here, they have done a very good job.
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...