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U of Michigan and Amazon To Offer 400,000 OOP Books
eldavojohn writes "Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 apiece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The [University of Michigan] librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' The University of Michigan has a library where Google is scanning rare books and was the aim of heavy criticism. (Some of the Google-scanned books are to be sold on Amazon.) How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen."
So how many books cover functional programming?
Ride the skies
I thought they were Object Oriented Programming books :( Had me going for a minute there...
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I love browsing college libraries, there is so much good stuff hidden in there that needs to see more light.
We've been pushing to go from Paper to Digital. It's interesting that they're going in the opposite direction here. The article has no mention of the Kindle. I find it hard to believe that the Kindle doesn't play some big role in this. Perhaps they will offer these books for free on the Kindle to help push the device? Personally, I think they should be online and free.
So Amazon is going to be so nice as to offer us the chance to PURCHASE what actually belongs in the public domain? Wow. I am impressed and excited.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I am curious about the right to copy a rare public-domain book. Let's say someone owns the only copy of a book. They do not allow anyone else to scan it. But, they do scan it themselves.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that? Could they sue me for copying their scanned version? Suppose they ran it through some OCR. Then they changed the layout but not the text. Now could they use that as a basis from stopping me from copying it? It's their font/layout configuration after all.
I suppose further, I could run their scanned work through my own OCR, and since the text itself is not copyrighted, I could then distribute the text.
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate. And as more and more public domain items come into the light, there will be more and more "stake holders" trying to protect their cash cows.
They can't sell reprints unless they are public domain. How many people who published works before 1929 are still alive?
This space available.
rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity.
As it will continue to sell for thousands due to its continued rarity, but you'll be able to get a cheaper new edition.
A huge problem today is anything that is from the past and successful is viewed as valuable. New stuff? Not so much.
Part of the problem is that there are actually few books today that are worth much. Authoring a book is hard. Authoring a good book is much, much harder and actually requires skill. So an accepted marketing technique is to reclaim something from the past that has quality and reissue it. Which is what is going on here. It is like a remake of a 1940s classic movie, only without the bad special effects that would be added. Imagine a remake of Casablanca with new digital special effects.
I would certainly agree that it would be nice if these books were available for the Kindle at $1 or less. Yes, scanning and proofing is hard work. But it is nothing compared to actually writing a successful book.
They can't sell reprints unless they are public domain. How many people who published works before 1929 are still alive?
Not all of these books are in the public domain. While I do not have a list of them, the article said only some of them are in the public domain. There are plenty of non-public domain books that are no longer in print and difficult if not impossible to get a hold of even if you have money to pay for them. That was why Google paid the Authors Guild and publishers $125 million (see the article I linked that is related to this story).
My work here is dung.
Out of print? That probably doesn't mean out of copyright.
Better hope no one torpedoes whatever you purchase, or you may awake one morning to your e-book gone and a feeble "Sorry!" note from Amazon in your inbox.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I'm going to be wickedly pissed if all my hard re-CATPCHA work was all so they could sell a book.
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
You know, I really don't have a problem with this as long as Google doesn't mind if someone takes one of their books, copies it straight out of the book and distributes it also. Regardless if it's more expensive, less expensive, free, etc. Google needs to remember that they do not own this public domain information and they are only a intermediary making this information more available. If they're ok with playing that role then more power to them.
If they ever lift a finger to say that someone "copied" their work though, I would love to donate to the lawsuit against them.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
This has already been done. There are several websites which do the same thing - reprint public domain content on the fly:
http://bibliolife.com/
http://www.kessinger.net/
http://www.publicdomainreprints.org
Interesting enough, BiblioLife was founded by the same people who founded BookSurge.
I haven't RTA yet, are they saying how long until they take them back again?
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I discovered that amazon sells many books that you can get for free from the publishers website, so I fully expect amazon to sell all the books that google scans (after all, since they are available for free, the cost to amazon is just the cost to make the entry in their database and upload the electronic version)
they are allowed to do this, just like we will be allowed to give them away for free, amazon is allowed to charge people to get the books.
people who are willing to spend a little time can shop around and find it for free.
Amazon Surge prints softcover PAPER books, not e-books.
and subsequently delete them.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The law makes DRM-cracking illegal. Does that mean that publishers can slap DRM on a public domain book (lapsed copyright or otherwise), and thereby for all practical purposes extend the copyright?
I suppose since Amazon and Google are taking the time to scan, clean up, edit, typeset, and republish these books, they should feel free to sell them like they'd sell it like any publisher can with other public domain works. The fact that the books are rare doesn't change the situation legally. If someone wanted to buy the restored Amazon/Google reprint of a rare public domain book, scan it, run it through OCR, remove the formatting, and give it away for free, they could. If someone else then took that text and printed it out into a book and sold it, they could do that too.
This could be amazing, almost like an iTunes for books. One person "rips" the book (what a bad phrase), then decentralized distribution. This could significantly reduce the price of things such as Textbooks.
GO BLUE!
I was writing an essay on Google Book Search's library project, and it was due YESTERDAY. And today you drop this on me? You couldn't have dropped this yesterday? A little time travel? Just for me? Ugh.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
i read the RSS feed in firefox & wondered for a few seconds, "wow there's 400,000 Object Oriented Programming books out there!!!"
realized what it meant when i opened the link....
Other companies have been in the facsimile/reprint business for a while. The best known (at least in the U.S.) is probably Dover Press, but there are others. What makes it interesting is that this is Amazon doing the publishing, meaning that there will be an order of magnitude more titles available than what places like Dover can manage.
My partner has ordered a few facsimile reprints of 17th century theological and philosophical works from Kessinger Publishing, works she wasn't able to get anywhere else. They're just poor facsimiles, almost photocopies, of old works, but even then manage to work in a little incompetence. Their printing of Sir Kenelm Digby's Of Bodies and of Man's Soul to Discover the Immortality of Reasonable Souls has on its cover (and as the title on the Amazon page!) one of the best editorial screw-ups ever.
Oh, I disagree!
They own the scan. They made it. But, I disagree that the scan is copywritable.
Gonna take a moment to smack you up-side the head.
*smack*
To describe something as "copywritable" is somewhat meaningless, of course - but to the extent it has any meaning at all, it would have the opposite meaning of copyright... Something "copywritable" would, presumably, be something you can copy. "Copyright" means that someone controls the right to copy something...
Bow-ties are cool.
IANAL
So does your mom.
Bow-ties are cool.
So does your mom. And I have the scans.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that?
yes
Under what law in what jurisdiction? In the United States, Bridgeman v. Corel excludes photocopies of an uncopyrighted work from copyright because they lack originality.
sorry too expensive for old things
I was involved a few years ago with a rather stupid lawsuit where a publisher got ahold of a database containing tens of thousands of scanned pages of documents well into the public domain. (original documents were from the 17th and 18th century) They argued that they could publish the documents as they were in the public domain. The Owner of the scans argued that they were reproducing copyrighted work. The courts agreed with the owners of the original scans.
The United States has a 1991 Supreme Court case to the contrary: Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service . Which country are you talking about?
And I hastily scanned both your moms, was dissatisfied with the results (too many earmarks, features unreadable, all yellow and faded), and ordered fresh copies. Still no answer from the copyright holders, though.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Sometimes the CRAP here is amazing:
1. Google is scanning the books, which makes it much less likely they will be lost
2. Someone, probably Google, will index all the books, so we can find them, IN PRINT or not.
3. Amazon will print, on demand, at a very reasonable price,
Please, dip-shit, tell me what is wrong with that, you clearly have not waited for an "inter-lending library lending system" to find a copy of a book you want to read. It took >3 years to get the UK copyright libraries to produce AE van Volgt and Smith's Lensmen books, because they were fiction and thus "not serious".
Personally I can not wait for google to create a new "Library of Alexandria" within which we can download books for 0 or a micro-transaction fee.
Publishers begin to understand this, and typically, want to stop it, tough luck.
Finally I subscribe to a number of pay for view sites (eg LWN.NET) which offer excellent value. and I would certainly subscribe to a good book/indexing service, commercial or otherwise.
I conclude, from your writings, that you are a complete idiot, your are paying for someone to do scanning/indexing and then, to print the book on paper, and ship it to you.
Otherwise do your own research and copy the book by hand.
Otherwise STFU.
the point is not "oooh out of print books become available". Most books are out of print. There's a 2006 Michio Kaku title i can't get cos it's already out of print. The issue is, if i buy his book through Google/Amazon's scheme, will Michio Kaku make a cent from it? his ideas, his blood sweat and tears.
Yes, you WILL see that. Even on the US edition.
They change a couple of words (may not even do that anymore) and yet still call it the Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. And get the full 90 year copyright on it.
When the copyright lasted 14 years, this wasn't much of a problem, but with a copyright of 90 years,all you have to do is wait until the original copies are nonexistent then you can own the public domain work.
Copyright on first print can last 10 years. Reprints 5.
And works MUST be made available in a transformative version. Binary programs: source code available. DRM'd products cannot have copyright at all. Compressed works must be decompressible without restricted computation.
After all, just because the source code is visible doesn't mean your source code can be taken in breech of copyright.
In Soviet America, public domain copyrights YOU!
mmmm...forbidden donut
All out of print books in the public domain should automatically be scanned and made available CHEAPLY for the public (and probably BY the public as well, ie. by the state); the price should only cover the actual cost of scanning and storing - and for printed version, the print costs.
And, I think books in general should either be kept in print or go into the public domain after 5 years.
I just recently picked up a 1906 edition of this book on Electricity and Magnetism. Having a scanned version available in no way diminishes the value of my hardback copy - in fact, it allows me to read passages that might otherwise be obscured by schmootz.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The University of Michigan Press is the repository of PhD theses from all over, including mine. As part of the class-action suit Google is getting permission -- one author at a time -- to scan all these theses, which are OOP but not public domain. I wonder if any of them are included in the 400k claimed in the story.
The quality of scans from Google Books seems very low to me; much lower than I'd use on my own Web site, http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ - it's not uncommon for pages to be missed, and in one 19th century mechanics textbook I was looking at, the low scan resolution meant that most of the line drawings and diagrams vanished entirely.
It's obvious to me that the Google work will need to be done again by people who care about the content. Note, by the way, that most flat-bed scanners destroy the binding of books, although some people are now using e.g. a Canon 5D full-frame-sensor SLR camera instead. For illustrations, some simple mathematics (and experience) shows 600dpi to be an absolute minimum for a scan of an engraving, with fine steel engravings needing at least 1200dpi (I used 2400) in order to prevent the lines from being aliased into a blotchy gray. This is much higher than the Canon SLR gives, but Betterlight have a 500 megapixel backend to a medium-format professional camera that would give enough resolution for a good digital fac simile, and e.g. the University of Wisconsin uses that sort of equipment. But it's much slower and hence more costly, and the files are huge.
Here's a fragment of text from a Google book I've been working with:
ALLEN ^Anthony), an English lawyer and antiquaiy,
was born at Great Hadbam in Hertfordshire, about the end
of the seventeenth century, and was edu<?^ted at ffton;
whence he went to King's college, Cambridge, and took
his bachelor's degree in 1707, and his master's in 1711.
He afterwards studied law, was ciiJI^d.to' the bar, and bjr
the influence of Arthur OnsloW^ speaker of the house of
commons, became a roaster in chancery. His reputation
as a lawyer was inconsiderable, Jbiut he was Esteemed a good
classical scholar, and a man of Wit: and -convivial habits.
The version I have at http://words.fromoldbooks.org/Chalmers-Biography/a/allen-anthony.html (I am still working on these) is based on scanning done at the University of Toronto, combined with four other digitisations, including two apparently independent ones by Google, both of the quality demonstrated here.
It might turn out that it would have been less work to have scanned this 32-volume encyclopedia myself (I have a copy) and so the OCR with commercial software that works 1,000 times better than Google's, but, for reprints, the important thing is the quality of the scanned images, not the OCR - and there too, the Google scans are really sucky.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts