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On the Google Book Scanning Project and the Library We Will Never See (theatlantic.com)

Posted by msmash on from the one-of-the-biggest-mysteries dept.

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.

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. This is an old article; has anything new happened? by mellon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I saw this go by back in April and was made sad by it. Now I am being made sad by it again. I wonder how hard it would be to crowdsource the same work. Like, just have everybody who thinks this is a tragedy do 10 books, and see how many that adds up to. The Google OCR API is available for use, and I think they may even have open sourced it so you don't have to run it in the cloud.

  2. AI silly! by eager_agony · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They have a great corpus to train their AI with now. Maybe the best in the world.

  3. Face it by thegreatbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sure others will note... Google almost certainly just wanted the data. Why would they need/want anything else out of the arrangement?

    --
    There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
  4. What is stopping Google from operating as a librar by kiviQr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What is stopping Google from operating as a library? For each city have a pool of ebooks that users can borrow for a week. They could have books that you can borrow for 1 min for search purposes. It should be cheaper that publicly funded libraries.

  5. This has been wonderful for me by idji · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Google Books helped me find books from 1838 that mentioned ancestors of mine by name and what they were doing. This is priceless to me.