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Amazon, MS, and Yahoo Against Google's Library
anonymousNR writes "From the BBC, 'Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works. "Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle said.'"
1. Competitor is kicking your ass at X
2. Form Open X Alliance
3. Profit!
It's about depriving us of access to out of print books. That is all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft won't have any complaints about Corbis and its buying up of images and their publication rights. Especially since Corbis was founded by Bill Gates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Knowledge is power. Letting Google control too much knowledge will give them a lot of power. Power corrupts.
Seriously, I'd much prefer an open database of scanned works rather than letting one company negotiate a deal.
They aren't monopolizing anything; they're cornering the market. Huge difference.
So what exactly is "open" about the Open Book Alliance? Or was the name chosen for being a bad play on words.
This guy's the limit!
Personally I don't care if BigCorpG or BigCorpM does it. I mean, all we really want is books to be available to anyone that wants to read, study and enjoy books. Imagine a world of an endless alway-open library system, free and available to anything that can connect to the web if it wants to borrow something new. The scanning effort Google is doing will never come in time for some books, but on the other hand they did hype it. Form an alliance be against Google, but at least show you can do it better.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
Too late to stop it dudes!
The more information you have, the more powerful you are.
Plain and simple... Google wanting to quantify everything from Planet Earth (Google Earth), to the Internet (this includes indexing all sites including wikipedia which is a massive store house of human Knowledge ).
You can then govern this knowledge how you like... Google HAS worked with the US government in regards to Terrorists and definetely the horrible child porn... do you think Google did so without a 'Fee'? At least Administrative fees.
Google if allowed to archive everything, even Tangible Items, like paper books, just Adds to the sum total Knowlege power house.
There is also an effort to convert old cassette and other old recordings into text, which can then be search able.
Google of course has already indexed this information, which can be sold to Lawyers.
Google needs competition, no doubt.
Google may be 'good' (as we can tell) right now... but money corrupts absolutely at some point.
Things can 'get out of hand' as you can see.
Microsoft signed up for the Open Book Alliance, to fight a suspected monopoly?
Of course, whenever there is a threat to the free market, we can always count on Microsoft to step up, the fearless defender of liberty and champion of the people.
Oh, wait...
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
:) Cat has my tongue.
MS obtain tech generally by stealing it, and lately by buying it.
Yahoo has NEVER had any real decent tech that it developed. For example, yahoo made heavy use of Perl and BSD.
Same for Amazon.
All have ridden on the coattails of real giants.
Mod away your fan bois.
Their wealth abandoned and forgotten until the last copy is lost. Each was once a treasure, each contains something unique that once lost is gone forever. Who knows what nuggets of wisdom once enshrined in print might enlighten, inform, inspire or entertain a new generation? Nobody knows. We do know from dangling references in works of historical importance that a great deal has always been lost. Amazon knows that if people continue to have access to old books, they won't buy as many new ones. Microsoft knows that they must fight the Google on every front from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Yahoo, well, we all know why they're following Microsoft in this. And so this vile crew set their goal not to do it better but to prevent this service to mankind.
Google's effort fights the loss. It struggles to retain as much as possible against the inevitable creep of time. It's great, in my mind, that this goal even occurred to them. If some others want to compete in this worthy cause they should do so. But to fight against it is evil: not potential evil, but actual and active evil.
Count me with the people who don't see the Internet Archive's angle in this. It's basically taking their "archive everything" web idea and applying it to dead tree based data. If preserving the drunken mumblings of every blogger is important, surely preventing the loss of the writings of Arnold J. Toynbee and the host of others like him must be more so. Not everything worth preserving has been published on the Internet. Yet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If I as a customer and citizen get to view whole books or book snippets for free while still having access to books as I used to have in the past, then why should I care if Google "monopolizes" the virtual library market or not?
University all access passes for their libraries and students.
Access to orphan books.
Easy for authors to claim rights and be compensated.
Easy reading on computers, mobile devices, and e-readers.
If you guys can accomplish all this as quickly and completely as Google will, I'll support you.
You do know what those loyalty cards from Borders are about, right? The ones where you get charged extra if you refuse to let them link your purchases to some personally identifying information? Sure, you can pay cash and pay extra, but if you put that "The Catcher in the Rye" on your visa, do you know they're not linking it anyway? What makes you think Amazon doesn't market your preference data?
If you want anonymity for your purchases online buy a prepaid credit card and buy from Firefox in privacy mode, from a remote desktop hosting account in a foreign country you pay for in eGold. If you want privacy from a bookstore pay more, in cash. You won't have as good a selection though.
None of these issues bear on the matter at hand. It's getting harder to manage your privacy. That's not Google's fault.
If these vendors want to scan a million books and put them online at a bookstore that takes eGold, doesn't use cookies and doesn't ask your name, you're a target market. Great. But somewhere in here there's a compromise that doesn't lose us the wealthy heritage of knowledge that are out of print books unavailable from any other source. Those books make up the majority of books ever printed after all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
How you doing, you scoundrel! I thought we'd lost you forever. It's good to see you back.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line irritating?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I like Bradbury's Farenheit 451 better.
Over the years, the novel has been subject to various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of "factoids", partial information devoid of context, e.g., Napoleon's birth date alone, without an indication of who he was.[6][7]
The two works do have a lot in common in this regard, but I think there's a subtle distinction between manufactured truth and just disassociating the populace from the culture that gives them reference to make them apathetic.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And get some offshore services called "remailers" to send the packages to. They rebundle your purchases and forward them to your real address. If you're really paranoid use several in a chain in different non extradition countries and pay extra for notification of warrant service.
If your tinfoil hat is on that tight, that is.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Fending off wild humans living with the Houyhnhnms allied with mythical female warriors, all while battling multiple sclerosis? Only you, misspelt ten raised to the hundredth power.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
The Internet Archive has been fighting this, but not to prevent access to out of print books. They want get the same deal as Google - the right to redistribute out of print books unless the author/publisher opts out. What they object to is that the current deal is structured to give Google essentially exclusive rights to charge for access to out of print books. Libraries get one (1) terminal allowed to access the books for free; everything else goes behind a Google paywall.
This is really a legal scheme to make copyright opt-in again, instead of opt-out. Before various revisions to US copyright law, you had to register copyrights and renew them to keep them in force. So out of print stuff slipped easily into the public domain. Under current law, most material is locked up by copyright, even if nobody cares.
a coalition of the weak...
The thing is, any one of these groups has the ability to strike a deal with the author's guild. Google doesn't have an exclusive license. All they have to do is get up in a business Google's adopted and out-compete them in quality of service.
I can see why they'd rather fight it out in court, but that doesn't mean I favor their cause.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Open Book Alliance motto: "We not only do evil, we try to prevent good."
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
> Boycott Novell
Ah yes, that's the website you shill for tirelessly and
where you boast to your buddies that you're gaming Slashdot:
After some thought, I've decided to keep using multiple accounts on Slashdot
And you even proudly announce you're stalking people.
You claim Slashdot is "tamed" because they remove your creative spelling when they choose to promote your stories.
Your friends even claim Slashdot is run by Microsoft.
Why do you even bother posting here if you hate Slashdot so much?
What is the point of google books really?
They dont make any free books freely available and only link to "buy this now" even for books and scans that are public domain globally.
I can seriously not find any books on google books that are available freely that are published prior to ca 1830. Perhaps 1830 is the cutoff when their "I sell public domain books for profit" partners have agreed on with google?
For example this book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9zuFXqw12hUC&q=strindberg&dq=strindberg&lr=
This book, published in 1919 is public domain in sweden, the us, europe, australia, ...
I can only find a "snippet view" and a link to where i can buy this book from a google partner.
Why cant i download the scans, as I can from TIA.
Great news that TIA get support from those three companies. TIE does a great job preserving history and books for us. Google books, less so.
GO TIA GO!
The words pot, kettle and black come to mind.
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
will make millions of out-of-print books widely available online \
Disclaimer: I will not attack your spelling, grammar, or punctuation in this post. It would waste even more of my readers' time, and be no challenge whatsoever. Besides, I'm surprised I'm bothering to respond to an AC at all, but I wanted desperately to clear up your misinformation.
My rebuttal of your post follows.
Firstly, a link is ridiculously simple to create, and greatly increases your chance of actually having the reader follow your browsing trail of breadcrumbs. Here, let me show you:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9zuFXqw12hUC
Secondly, the page you failed to link to has the 1919 version of a book that was actually published in 1950 (twice!) and 1951. The three links at the bottom have access to full scans of all three earlier versions of that text.
Thirdly, There's not even a "snippet" link on the page you're linking to, so it may either have been yanked due to the slashdot effect, or perhaps it's not finished being scanned in? I seem to recall reading that this "digitize everything ever written" project is "in process".
Next, I will wonder why you are upset that you can't find any books prior to 1830, public domain or otherwise. Are you really upset that you can't find any books in this collection written/published more than 200 years ago? 200 years ago, humans didn't have electricity. Books were ineffably physical objects. A "searchable database" might have consisted of an entire library's known collected works, perhaps in a card catalogue - but more likely, catalogued (by hand!) in one of the tomes contained in the very same building as the collection it catalogued (the Network Administrator and "IT Guy" in me shudders at the thought of not having an off-site backup, but I digress). I'm not sure how long we've had mechanized printing, but it can't have been too terribly long in the grand scheme of things (sure, mod me uninformative for not providing a link to the wiki page for the printing press).
I will then continue dissecting this particular snippet of your post, wondering aloud (so to speak (type?)) if you intended to use the phrase "later than", as opposed to your wording "prior to" - the arguments you supply seem to support the latter. Your example, which you seem to be attempting to use to support your claim (ie, being unable to find the text in question) being published nearly 90 years after your "cutoff date" is confusing, otherwise.
To continue dissecting the logic here, you complain that you cannot download a scan of the book in question; I clicked two of the three links I mentioned earlier, to see if the "full scan" was available, and lo: there are links at the top-right side of the page to download the PDF.
Furthermore, I may be putting my foot in my mouth, because I just realized that the work you linked to is volumes 50-51 of the work in question, and since I don't read whichever language it's written in (and don't particularly care what language it's written in, to be honest - I can tell at least that it's Nordic, and were I interested in whatever the subject matter is, I'm sure I could find someone to at least help me get the gist of it (there's over 6 billion of us humans on this mudball, after all)), I can't determine which volumes of "Samlade Skrifter" are linked in at the bottom. I also didn't bother to read the page so I could see if it is described somewhere on the page (again, because I don't care). I'm lazy, whatever. Your example appears to be full of logic holes... My point being that there are easily half a dozen reasons why your whining does nothing to improve or further this discussion.
I'm all for freedom of information, don't misunderstand me. Cheering for someone who seems to be trying to do the same thing is also cool in my book (pardon the pun). Bitching because some obscure work that you're interested in isn't available *yet* (note the emphasis) seems worse than unproductive to me - it's annoying. If anything, we might be upset that
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Much as I admire Kahle and archive.org, people have been talking about putting libraries online for decades, talking and talking and talking. archive.org has put a lot of good stuff online, but it's a grab-bag. Ditto the Library of Congress. Ditto university libraries. There are many places that offer interesting collections that make fascinating browsing.
But as far as I know, if you have the title of a specific oldish book that you actually need or want to read, there are only two places you can go with any serious likelihood of finding them:
a) Project Gutenberg
b) Google Books
I think Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo should shut up until they've done as much for readers as Project Gutenberg and Google have.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line irritating?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's not a matter of "as if Google did nothing" - it's a matter of, "because Google did something, neither I nor anyone can to it too." Google has become a gatekeeper. Where else have we seen this before? Ever heard of Lexis Nexis? It's a service that gives you access to the documents associated with legal proceedings all across the country. For a fee, that is. In other words, they've taken public property and cornered the market on a particular method of distribution. So if you want it, you have to do things their way, and as far as I know, there are no competitive alternatives. I'd say that's a problem that may very well end up repeating itself.
I think that "open" doesn't always mean "open" in the same sense that we'd all like it to.
For example, MS Windows is the most open OS there has ever been! It opens its legs and every orifice it has when connecting to internet...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Google in no way prevents anyone else from doing this, Copyright and authors/publishers prevent anyone else from doing this.
This is providing more access than before, not less.
Here is some thing construtive from Google Books Strindbergs books in Swedish and all books in any language
Thing is Strindberg died 1912 nothing significant can have been added since then. The problem is that we can't access a book that should be available, and it's unclear how to get access to it. As you say you don't care about what language it is, and that's one of the problems it's hard for Google to handle non english books.
then again, they are charging money for that nowdays too, one obscure book was going to cost me twenty five dollars to borrow. seeing as how i make $11/hour, i said 'no'.
so, whatever was in that book, did not get put into the wikipedia article that i wrote about the subject.
I'd care a lot more if after"Buying" a book, I was able to read it without having to be on-line at their website!! I had assumed that if I "Bought" the book I would own it and be able to download it and read it on my "not to be named" digital book reader! Since I can't, forget them!! Let someone else do it right!!
People used to form alliances to fight Microsoft. Now Microsoft is joining an alliance to fight Google. What is it he wrote in The Road Ahead about death coming swiftly to the market leader?
Does this
The "Open Book Alliance" can do whatever they want and negotiate whatever deals they want with publishers.
This is -not- at odds with Google's settlement which will bring orphaned works that -nobody currently gets money for- online. This is a good thing for humanity!
All that is happening here is that Brewster is pissed that he does not carry the clout to negotiate such a deal himself. He hates Google.
Uhhhh. I sense much fail.
Just let google do what it wants, unlike the companies in the "alliance," google gets stuff done.
Frankly I agree. Google is attacking the print industry and it should not be unchallenged. An alliance brings standardization I approve of this.
Google is a business, just like everyone else!
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Twitter has more accepted slashdot stories than anybody I know of. If he finds a thing interesting the odds are the rest of us do too. Like myself he might find life not challenging enough to be interesting. For this space though the point is moot.
Twitter finds us interesting stuff on the Internet. This is a useful service. Twitter posts in articles many interesting things others might not know about because he's got a long memory and an axe to grind. This gives us contrary dialog to the marketdroids who would embrace a product because it's in their financial interest to do so. Twitter finds us astroturf trollbots to ignore. That's a good service too. Yes, his $'isms are a nuisance. Nonetheless he adds more value to slashdot than I do, and that's quite a bit.
Every challenge is an opportunity. I doubt Twitter could be induced to work for Microsoft but Yahoo is doable. For a measly $250k/yr Twitter could move a lot of mindshare. It's just bonus that he couldn't be spending all of his energy poking holes in every marketing effort. Oh FSM how I hate myself for posting that. The guy has every bit as much influence as Matt Asay, or more. We would miss him, but his children would be fat.
Help stamp out iliturcy.