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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.
That's why it's dead.
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.
When I worked at the Google IT help desk in 2008, the building next door had all the book scanners. It was supposedly a miserable place to work at, low pay for flipping book pages, a relentless daily quota and a high turnover rate. Makes help desk support look like paradise.
Sad thing is if done right Google books could have competed with Goodreads, Amazon, and others making them billions. Just another of googles failures with half assing projects and then pulling the plug. They are adding up.
- Gronk!
Consulting for several large companies, I'd always done my work on Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way (specifically, Linux's lack of support for some things and the fact that we were unable to defrag some stuff), all in all the process went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 10.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, then maybe. Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time my friends.
Jeeze, no wonder it wasn't a huge success.
I would have assumed they could done:
1) Cut off the spine and sheet feed books that were common enough that a copy could be destroyed in the process (or hell, it could have been rebound and resold -- perhaps they could have advanced a technique for unbinding-rebinding, too).
2) Automate page flipping for books that couldn't be spine-cut or sheet fed. This seems like it would have been a major side benefit of this project, a page flipping book scanner. It would seem like something that could almost be a niche product business unto itself -- I'd imagine there are many organizations or even people with stacks of bound materials they would like scanned but where the reality of scanning bound material in traditional ways is just too labor intensive.
3) Some small number of books may need to manually scanned because they are fragile or rare, but I'd think automated page flipping would cover the vast majority.
I was always of the opinion that Google Books was a rip off of Project Gutenberg.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
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...
Seriously, Google is now becoming a joke very fast and will no doubt follow the typical MBA path to dying off. Worse, they will choose to outsource to India and CHina while ignoring the fact that they are losing their capabilities and sending it to their competitors.
But, one of the best tools that they had up and coming was the android that was built in swappable parts. that would have allowed for TRUE competition to occur in android phone. Now, Google will see Samsung and CHinese companies build their own software and end up controlling BOTH software and hardware.
THis is all due to their switch from innovative tech CEO at Google to a worthless MBAs, combined with alphabet allowing this shit to happen.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Good comment and deserves the "insightful" mod. My thoughts are similar, though I'd appeal to first principles:
The original mission statement was overwhelming, but the original scanning project fit with the idea of all knowledge for everyone. The shite hit the fan when they tried to squeeze PROFITS out of it and their lust for profits conflicted with the vested interests and fantasy profits of the publishers. (Or maybe it wasn't so much the fantasy profits associated with the orphan works as the actual competition from public domain books against the fresh books, many of which are basically garbage that deserves to be crushed in the market.)
Anyway, back to the google's mission statement. They were overwhelmed by too much information and had to prioritize things. The profit motive drove them to focus on the most important information of all, the information in the ads that they get paid for. Making all the world's information available simply mutated into making the ads available and the metric of utility was reduced to the profits of the corporations that are paying the google corporation. Any benefit to actual human beings has become rather incidental.
Remember that old slogan about evil? That's mutated, too. The current slogan of the google is "All your attention are belong to us", but that's how most of the so-called successful corporate cancers feel these days. We're forced to pick on the basis of being manipulated (per my sig) or considering which flavor of cancer seems relatively less evil today.
Just a few examples, but beyond the google I'm especially aware of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Exxon. Feel free to add your favorite corporate cancer here. (In particular I want to identify the the cancer playing games with my mouse. I thought the Comet cursor was dead and buried... Or maybe it's the NSA or the Russians?)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
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Things like this that are of such cultural significance shouldn't be subject to the vagaries of Wall Street and its hedge-fund douchebros. It should be spun off into a non-profit to which other entities can contribute donations. Google can provide the seed funding and get a nice fat tax write-off.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman