Slashdot Mirror
Google Abandons Plan To Archive World's Newspapers
An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the past few years, Google's newspaper-scanning project has digitized more than 60 million pages from newspapers spanning 250 years, including such gems as the moon landing. But according to the Boston Phoenix, this ambitious effort is slated to soon be axed in favor of Google One Pass, a platform for publishers to monetize content from their own sites."
In addition to being archived by the newspaper company, most local newspapers are already archived by local libraries as microfiche/microfilm. This is often required by law, as public notices are required to be placed in newspaper, and a record of this must be kept. Important national newspapers are archived by the Library of Congress, as well as multiple other libraries, where they are also digitized.
This is where Google got their source data to scan/upload in the first place.
I've got a feeling that this has more to do with them not being able to secure rights to the newspapers. At least for the more recent ones they would require authorization to do so from the copyright owner. I'm not sure why the older ones aren't being scanned though. Perhaps that's a matter of Google needing access and most of those papers being held by the newspapers that published them originally.