Slashdot Mirror
How Google Book Search Got Lost (backchannel.com)
Google Books was the company's first moonshot. But 15 years later, the project is stuck in low-Earth orbit, argues an article on Backchannel. From the article: When Google Books started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, it would import the entire body of pre-internet writing into its database. [...] Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog, as authors fought Google's right to index copyrighted works and publishers maneuvered to protect their industry from being Napsterized. A decade-long legal battle followed -- one that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud that had so long hovered over Google's book-related ambitions. But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that's not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition. Google stopped updating Books blog in 2012, and folded it into the main Google Search blog. The author reports that Google still has people working on Book Search, and they are adding new books, but the pace is rather slower.
Google had to to it in the least damaging way possible. It was a necessary condition if they wanted libraries to cooperate.
Non-library books were processed destructively, by cutting off the spine.
No. Gutenberg makes text versions of fairly common books. You might think that they're uncommon, but as an academic who specializes in European books of the 15th-17th centuries, I can tell you that Google has found things that are absolutely miraculous. I've seen Google scans of books that exist in only four copies in libraries across Europe. I've seen whole sub-genres of literature that were thought lost suddenly appear on the internet. If you work in early modern literature, especially older forms of German and French or newer forms of Latin, Google Books and its associated HathiTrust project are a revolution, and the Gutenberg Project isn't even a blip on the radar.