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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.
Are they a shareholder-answerable business?
Does it make them money?
No? What did you expect?
This isn't surprising. It never took off like some other things, it therefore turns into an expense with little return (Do they charge a percentage of book sales found through their searches? Can they enforce that and stop you just taking the ISBN and buying from Amazon once you've found it?), so it will die when people lose personal interest in it.
The only things I can see staying any significant length of time are Google search and Google Apps. Everything else is just a boredom / filler project that can disappear like so many others, Google or not.
"I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Edison, on the electric light bulb.
Google Books always seemed like a great idea, but the idea of the search giant owning all of the data always made me incredibly uncomfortable. This data should be in the public domain. Authors should feel *privileged* to submit their works for inclusion in the database, not fighting it. It seems that, at least recently, Google Books has served primarily as a means to drive book *sales*. That's not an admirable goal. It's time for Google Books to be converted to a community-driven effort, like Wikipedia. Release all the data under a Free database license that ensures the data can not be used commercially and allow the community to help with the effort. This would be an incredible achievement for humanity in general. Oh well, one can dream...