Google's Struggle To Reach Authors — of Every Book Ever Written

eldavojohn writes "There's no lack of news surrounding the settlement of Google's controversial move to digitize books — but how do you even start this endeavor? A New York Times story reveals the obstacles they face just to get the word out that they want to settle with publishers and authors everywhere. They turned to a world-wide ad campaign to start the $125 million settlement process and they're spending $7 million to $8 million in paper print ads and telephone hot-lines (handling 80+ languages) to reach as many people as possible. From the article: 'We looked at how many books were published in various areas and we knew from the plaintiffs and Google that 30 percent were published in the US, 30 percent in industrialized countries. The rest of the world is the rest.' That's quite the herculean task! Hopefully Google's efforts in digitizing books will breathe new life and revenue into authors and publishers the world over."

Comments

Re:awful for technical searches

[Esine]

It's not like they're going to use the same exact search algorithm or parameters for everything. Look at Google Code Search (http://google.com/codesearch). It even supports (limited) regexp!

Re:free books?

[I'm not really here]

My local library has a "digital library" available. I can download their application and listen to a book on my laptop, can read a book in their proprietary reader, etc. Their system simply disallows the physical copy to leave the library while the digital copy is out, thereby ensuring that they've purchased the rights to lend that book.

You can't get it on a kindle, but if you have a netbook running windows, the digital library is here. If you're using an e-book reader, or use any other OS, you're screwed (This is one of the many myriad of reasons that my house still has XP machines in it, though Linux is stepping in where I can use it).

It's not that the digital library isn't here, it's that it's crippled beyond use for many people, and that is what will ultimately destroy the concept.