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On the Google Book Scanning Project and the Library We Will Never See (theatlantic.com)
For a decade, Google's enormous project to create a massive digital library of books was embroiled in litigation with a group of writers who say it was costing them a lot of money in lost revenue. Even as Google notched a victory when a federal appeals court ruled that the company's project was fair use, the company quietly shut down the project. From an article published in April this year: Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation. It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It's like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It's there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages -- to do so, they've said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time -- and here we've done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it's 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they're the ones responsible for locking it up. But Google seems to be thinking ways to make use of it, it appears. Last month, it added a new feature to its search function that instantly connects you with eBook data from libraries near you. From a report: Now, every time you search for a book through Google, information about your local library rental options will be easily available. Yeah, that's right. Your local library not only still exists, but it has eBooks, which are things you can totally borrow (for free) online! Before, this perk was hidden somewhere deep within your local library's website -- assuming it had one -- but now these free literary wonders are all yours for the taking.
You thought wrong. It's a widely held fallacy about copyright, though. Copyright covers any unauthorized reproduction of a work, whether it's for sale or not. The only exceptions are for parody or fair use (which means such things as small quotes in a review of the work).
I wonder how hard it would be to crowdsource the same work.
Project Gutenberg has been at it since the 70's. But they currently only have 54.000 books, not a whole lot compared to Google's 25 million books.
Getting to see the books is not what Google Books is for. It was never what Google Books was for. You've bought into the fallacy promoted by the Authors Guild, who came in after the fact and tried to wangle their lawsuit against Google Books into an orphaned-works library without actually having any authority to do so. Google shrugged and went along with it, because why not, but it was never what they had intended.
From the very beginning, Google Books (nee Google Print) was intended to populate a search database so people could search within paper books as easily as they could search within the web. If the book was still in copyright, then finding that book to read was the searcher's problem. (Interlibrary loan works a treat.) Google was very straightforward about that in early blog posts and publicity about the project. Don't blame them for falling short of the Authors Guild's goals. Those goals were never theirs to begin with. See the link in the first paragraph for more information.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Amusing quote, and what's even more ironic, in the context of this discussion, is that you didn't bother to credit the author:
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Chapter 25).
So, your worldview is apparently that not only should authors not be paid, they shouldn't even be credited.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is apocryphal. While that sort of sentiment existed (or still exists?) within Islam. The claim that Omar ordered it's burning first appeared many centuries later. Also the actual burning of the library was centuries prior to the advent of Islam.
Meanwhile, archive.org is scanning a thousand new books every day and nobody's writing news stories about it...