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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
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!
Those companies already have an open database of scanned works hosted by the Internet Archive. You are free to use it and ignore Google's larger, indexed library.
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.
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.
The complaint, though, is that Google alone will have access to in-copyright but unknown-author books, as part of the terms of the settlement. It's a weird sort of legal loophole in that nobody normally would have access, but if Google successfully settles a class-action lawsuit, then the class representatives can give Google permission on behalf of the class members. The only way for anyone else to get similar permission would be to either contact these unknown authors individually, or find a way to get a class-action lawsuit filed against them that would enable them to negotiate a similar settlement.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Because when you have access so much information controlled by one organization, you are wholly at the mercy of that organization. If Google decides that they don't want you reading some book for whatever reason, then you're shit out of luck unless you've got a hard copy of it. When you have an organization comprised of and accountable to several organizations, then you [ostensibly] have a lesser chance of shit like that happening.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
You're the second person to post some variation on the 'knowledge is power, and some people want to control that power' theme, and I just wanted to add that there's some real, specific reasons this applies at the present time to out of print books, for those who may think the meme is a little paranoid.
A few weeks ago, I read a book on higher dimensional geometry (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension - by Rudolph v. B. Rucker). It was published in 1977 in a cheap Dover paperback edition. In the back, there's references to a large number of books and papers on Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and abstract math, by some of the most famous names of 20th century physics (Einstein, Wheeler, Hawking, Everett, Minkowski, etc.) A tremendous number of these turn out to be out of print and unavailable through Amazon or other common sources. In one case, I was offered a copy of one work for over 300 dollars.
There are also a lot of books on the 'occult' side of higher dimensions in the references. Rucker isn't pushing an esoteric knowledge angle - He quotes from several of these, but he's often very critical of the misinterpretations of science found in them, and while he sees some interesting features in the works of people like P. D. Ouspensky or J. W. Dunne, he comes down rather harder on Carlos Castaneda. A little checking on these found a surprising number of them were in print or available online at low costs, and most of the rest were being offered free online from various occult groups websites.
What all this implies is left as an exercise for the astute reader. One example does not, by itself, make much of a trend, but it would be interesting if other such cases exist.
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Who is John Cabal?
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.
If Google decides that they don't want you reading some book for whatever reason, then you're shit out of luck unless you've got a hard copy of it.
So.. kinda like if Google did nothing?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
Well, there's no real official way into the market. If they just started violating copyright, it's possible someone might file a class-action lawsuit against them, and possible they might be able to negotiate some sort of settlement similar to the one Google got. But it's not at all clear that that would be the outcome. Google's basically found a very clever way of using the class-action mechanism's preclusion to violate the copyright of people who haven't agreed, because class-action lawsuits are opt-out rather than opt-in.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Seriously, I'd much prefer an open database of scanned works rather than letting one company negotiate a deal.
It is a nontrivial exercise to obtain high-quality scans of 20+ million books. The scanning must be done non-destructively, since nearly all of these books are out of print. This means someone/something turning pages and taking pictures. It costs most archivists hundreds of dollars to scan each book this way. Which is fine if you're the Brewster Kahle trying to compile a very small collection. If you want to do a complete job of it, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions -- and that's if you get the scanning technology and QC pipeline right.
The question is: Who pays all that money to do the scanning?
I'm guessing Brewster Kahle would prefer that the US Government fund it. Maybe that would be nice, but I don't think it's particularly realistic. Other than that, only Google has stepped up to this effort. Microsoft quit theirs last year. If Google thought they had no legal basis to use this material, or make any money from it, I guarantee they would stop the scanning in an instant. They aren't stupid after all.
I'm guessing the "Open Book Alliance" has no intent to invest the scale of effort needed to pull this off. They're just trying to shoot torpedoes at Google.
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.
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.
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!
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