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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
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?
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."
Remind me not to borrow your Nokia 770.
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!
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:
The Open Library is a Brewster Kahle project. Brewster envision, built, and funded the Internet Archive. He has been scanning books for a decade (with Raj Reddy of CMU) this project predates Google's by several years. He approached Google when he started expanding the Text Archive beyond the Gutenberg collection (which the Internet Archive was hosting), but Google wanted to do their own thing, one that would be more profitable to them, so he got funding from other sources. He invented WAIS, which was one of the first internet searches (it indexed FTP, Gopher, and early HTTP sites). In 95 he donated a relatively huge and expensive hard drive to the project which saved the only copies of the earliest usenet postings which were on rapidly deteriorating tapes. He has repeatedly challenged the DMCA and Sonny Bono copyright extension in partnership with Lawrence Lessig. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Unlike Google, there are no ads on any archive.org hosts other than the ones that were originally in the pages that are archived. As for what is wrong with Google's approach, they make gobs of money and never once offered any of it to the people who pay (either in money or time) to create the content. Brewster's goal is "Universal Access to all Knowledge", he doesn't need to say "do no evil", as he believes that goes without saying. He has done all of this while asking for nothing in return. So trust google if you want, I know Brewster and trust him.
As for searching, the text of the books is indexed and searchable, if you want to do a general search inside the book, you can use google, who usurps the rights of the authors, or you could use Amazon who only surfaces the texts that the rights owners have allowed to be indexed.
BTW A major coder for google while it was google.stanford.edu, was writing much of that code while working for Brewster at Alexa. There are rumors about the cleanliness of that code, but Brewster was never concerned about any of this, nor the fact that egroups, which started on another machine on the Alexa network, sold to Yahoo for $500 Million.
The old stuff, the dime novels and pulps of a previous century, classics that have fallen out of academia's sights, antique reference books and manuals... THOSE are the things most in danger of being completely lost. And no wonder, when the current generation can't see any value in preserving them, let alone reading them. Do they likewise see no value in other artifacts of history??
.... it had dozens of lovely drawings that would naturally be lost without the full-page scans (and for all we know, may not be preserved anywhere else).
It's the old stuff I can't find ANYWHERE else that interests me about the Open Library project. Obscure? Maybe now, but not necessarily in its day. And regardless, that doesn't mean it should be thrown on the scrapheap of history. What is ignored today may well be tomorrow's classic.
Oh, there's already Project Gutenburg? A commendable project, and all well and good for plain text. But what about stuff like the very first book I ever looked at from the Open Library
The big advantage of such projects is that if enough people worldwide make copies for their personal archives, that's a hedge against the material being lost (via natural disaster, civil disorder, or whatever). We don't have to suffer another burning of the Library at Alexandria -- we have the means to spread preserved copies far and wide. Let's take advantage of that, not denigrate the archivists' efforts.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?