Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?"
Most people seem to be unaware that Google Books is actually two programs, which were originally named Google Publisher and Google Library. Google Publisher contains books submitted by the publisher, and the publisher has granted Google the right to display some percentage of the book, and are listed as Limited Preview in the Google search results. This increases sales but does not violate copyright, presuming that the publisher's contract with the author allows then to advertise in this method (if not, that's between the author and publisher).
Google Library, on the other hand, are from books borrowed from libraries, scanned by Google, without permission from the copyright holder. If a Google Library book is in the public domain (mainly US books prior to 1923, or foreign books prior to 1909), the entire book is displayed, and is listed as Full View in the Google search results, this is unlikely to increase sales, and does not violate copyright. Google Library books not in the public domain (actually, some are in public domain due to copyright holders not making the required copyright renewal, but Google is not interested in doing the research), then the book is only displayed in Snippet View, 3 lines per search hit. The snippets themselves would not violate copyright, as they are small enough that they would likely qualify as fair use, no matter what. However, what the publishers and authors (represented by the Author's Guild) are claiming, is that any complete digital scan without the permission of the copyright holder, for whatever purpose (especially one when the book is borrowed rather than purchased) is a copyright infringement. Google is arguing that since they are not using the books directly, but simply using the scans to provide fair use snippets, it meets enough of the 4 rules the courts use to determine fair use. Most of the books in snippet view are out of print, so it's not likely that snippet view increases sales anywhere near the amount a limited preview does. IANAL, but I think the publishers and especially the authors will win a pyrrhic victory should the courts decide in their favor.
By limiting the number of pages of a book I can view, Google is providing me information under fair use (their assertion). Distributing the entire book (which they do not do), would be illegal. The groups bringing the suit, though, are saying that several highly relevent pages from the book is too much for it to be fair use.
The books scanned from the libraries only display 3 line snippets if they're not public domain, copyrighted books with full pages visible are books where the publisher gave permission, and are not involved in the lawsuit.
The gist of the lawsuit is that even though the snippets returned by Google's search would be fair use, the electronic copy created in order to make the search is an unauthorized copy, and therefore taints the end use.
I actually think Google has backed themselves into a corner. By limiting the number of pages of a book you can view, they are pretty much admitting that it's illegal.
Google Books is comprised of two sources, Google Library, which scans books and displays the entire book if it's public domain, or a 3 line snippet if not, and Google Publisher, where the publisher provides the source of the book (well, Google might do the scanning with the permission of the publisher), and the publisher tells Google what percentage of the book is viewable. Any book found in Google Books that has a limited view is available by permission of the publisher, and therefore not applicable to the suit. Only books with a snippet view are of concern with the lawsuit as they are the only ones where Google might need permission from the copyright holder.
...And since these books are already freely available in public libraries, why shouldn't they be on the Internet?
The publishers argument is that the public libraries paid the publisher for a copy of the book, and Google didn't. Those books in the library are only freely available because members of the community supporting the library (i.e., taxpayers, alumni, students) loan them out (or make them available for general use within the library).
The publishers aren't objecting to Google putting up public domain books, they're objecting to Google borrowing copyrighted library books, scanning them and then putting snippets up on the Internet. The case boils down to whether the Supreme Court will consider Google's actions fair use (and regardless of the original rulings, it will be appealed up to the Supreme Court). Personally, I think the publishers and Author's Guild are trying to stop something that will be ultimately advantageous to them, but I'm sure they're trying to establish boundaries that are favorable to them (and, of course, to extract money out of Google).
The original images Google made available were really low quality, about 75 DPI black and white, and the Open Content Alliance's images will be about 400 DPI color (Yahoo! and MSN are contributing to OCA). Volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/ have been scraping images from Google since they started the Google Books (Library) project. Now that Google makes PDF files with higher resolution black and white images available, the images work better with the OCR programs used by the DP volunteers, but it's still not as high a resolution as OCA's. Google has made over 100,000 public domain books available in full view mode, but quality control has been rather spotty. Most books with illustrated plates are missing the illustrations and/or pages around the illustrations.
Any scraping done by a competitor would need to have people doing some portion of the scraping, as Google either requires CAPTCHA responses or blocks all access from IP addresses/ranges where they detect signs of scraping.
Google Books has two distinct sources, libraries and publishers. If a book is scanned from a library, it is either classified as public domain (1922 or earlier in the US, 1865 or earlier elsewhere), the book is fully viewable a page at a time, and in some cases a PDF of the entire book is also available (presumably Google will provide PDFs of all public domain books eventually). Library books that are not public domain can only be viewed in snippet form, 3 lines at a time. If the book source is provided by a publisher, the publisher determines how much of the book can be viewed, from as little as the title page, table of contents and a sample page, to the entire book. Unfortunately, Google takes the word of the publisher, and if the publisher wants to claim that their copy of "Alice in Wonderland", using the Tenniel illustrations is copyrighted, you're only going to see a few pages.
There are plenty of ways for publishers to add a snippet of copyrighted material to a book, from the cover art and blurb, to a short introduction, but sometimes they just lie and slap on a copyright anyway. I know of at least two companies who appear to be only in the business of reprinting public domain works, claiming copyright and using Google Books to advertise.
I think it's time some Los Angeles residents start picketing Jerry Vlasak and his wife Pamelyn Ferdin (another animal-rights extremist), and leaf-letting his neighborhood with claims that they are terrorists and/or terrorist supporters, so that they can get a taste of their own medicine.
Yes, Discover takes a bigger percentage from the retailer than Mastercard or Visa, which is why not everyone accepts Discover. However, if you're using a Mastercard or Visa, and not in a reward program, you're just giving the credit card issuer additional profit, because the retailer pays a fixed rate regardless of any reward program associated with the card. If you only pay by cash, feel free to ask for a pay-by-cash discount. Some retailers will give you one if you ask.
While it's true that merchants generally pay a larger percentage for charges with American Express and Discover, the amount they pay for a Visa or Mastercard charge is not tied to the rewards offered by individual bank. That's the bank's cost of marketing, and lowers the bank's profit, not the retailer's.
*In the credit card industry, deadbeats are people who pay off their credit cards every month, which means the bank makes little or no profit on them. Of course, if everyone were a deadbeat, it would be nearly impossible to find a credit card with no annual fee.
For most credit card companies, all you need to do is call the credit card company and ask them to send you the form for automatic payment. One of the options should be "pay in full", if not, it's time to look for a different card. You just need to send them the form with a cancelled check, and in one or two months, it's automatic.
In the case Discover (the card I use most), you would have 1% of that LCD monitor in your cash-back account ($25), and you would be redeem the account in $20 increments. Choices include check, crediting your account, or gift certificates for various companies (up to $40 for $20 redeemed). Assuming I go for cash or credit, it's like getting a 1% discount on everything I buy. For your LCD monitor, unless they gave you a deal for buying in cash, it's like getting it for $2475 instead of $2500 without haggling.
As you've learned, you need to get into the mindset, the credit card is a debit card. Once you've treat learned to treat it as such (and I think the automatic payment-in-full helps), you'll realize the credit limit is irrelevant. I have credit limits much larger than monthly salary, and it doesn't matter to me at all, because when I am buying something, I don't ask myself "Am I close to my credit limit", I ask "Am I close to my budgeted maximum monthly expenditure?"
Theoretically, having one or two credit cards with moderate limits will give you a better credit score than having no credit cards at all. This could lower the interest rate you get the next time you need a loan (car or mortgage). I'm not sure that it's worth it to pay money to see your credit score though.
One last suggestion, move some of that money in your savings/checking account into a high(er) interest savings account, preferably automatically with payroll deduction. Out of sight is out of mind, especially when trying to maintain a budget. Only pull the money out of the savings when it's a planned big budget item, or an unforseen but necessary one like major car or house repair.
You'd be better off dumping the debit card for a no annual fee credit card with a cash-back reward. Set up the credit card with automatic payment of 100% of the outstanding balance (it's easy to do). Depending on how much you spend a year, you could be eligible for hundreds of dollars in cash-back rewards. You've already developed the discipline to only spend what you have in reserve, and a credit card set to pay off in full is just a debit card with a 20-30 day grace period. The only thing evil about credit cards is that the credit card companies encourage people to spend more than they can afford, and discourage people from paying them off by setting low minimum payments and offering things like "no payment due" months (while accruing additional interest, of course).
What's your problem with online banking? I don't use it to pay off the bills, but I check it regularly to help keep tabs on my spending. That's no different from calling the automated phone system.
There are a few in-print books at Project Gutenberg, mostly distributable under a Creative Commons license. Cory Doctorow's works are there for sure, but I haven't looked lately to see who else is doing it.
Then I'd have do take the extra step of deleting the partition when I install FreeBSD. It would only save me 2 seconds, but it would save the PC vendor whatever time it took to install Ubuntu.
No, BSD vs GPL licensing has nothing to do with this. Theo's irritation is that OpenBSD is having financial problems, and nobody using applications original from the OpenBSD code base, like pf and OpenSSH, is stepping up to the plate and paying OpenBSD's bills. If OpenBSD had been developed entirely under the GPL, OpenBSD could still be having financial problems, because a commercial application using GPL'd code is under no obligation to pay a portion of their proceeds to the developers of the GPL'd code.
Other BSD licensed open source projects, like Apache and FreeBSD are doing much better financially because they have large corporations using their products who are willing to contribute money and/or services like web hosting in addition developer time. So OpenBSD's real problem is that either they haven't found a corporate sugar daddy, or Theo's managed to sabotage any deals that might have happened in the past.
That's assuming a new edition uses the old edition's cover art and provides a good synopsis. That may be true for computer books, but it's usually not the case for fiction.
First of all, the OP was asking for advice on cataloging his library, not for you to critique his lifestyle. For all you know, he may already be contributing your entire salary to famine relief, and doesn't have your phenomenal memory to remember each and every book instantly.
Second, he may be a collector of genres that his local library and bookstores don't collect (or only do so on a limited basis), and many of his books may be ones that are not easily found at either a library or bookstore. Furthermore, donating them to a library doesn't mean that it will go on the library's shelves, donated books often end up at a "friends of the library" sale, and ones that don't end up in another private collection are recycled, so donating to a library doesn't mean that he'd ever get a chance to reread them should he desire to later.
In order to stay on topic, I have tried Readerware, and while I thought it was OK, I never quite brought myself to go from using it on a trial basis to buying the product. I liked the download from internet features. I thought it was slow at internet lookups, but that's probably so that it wouldn't overload the servers it was querying. I was doing batch loads with a Cue Cat scanner, and I'm not sure if I ever tried a one-at-a-time load to see if it has a background query. If you're using it to verify that you aren't accidentally buying something you already have (or even trying to track down the rest of the books in a series), and you have a PDA, make sure that the PDA client can handle 3000 entry database. Many PDA DBs choke on that size DBs.
The final paragraph of TFA says it all, what sells is a functional website. IMHO, anything requiring flash+javascript is usually neither functional nor pretty.
If this was rating Funny, instead of Interesting, I'd have passed it by. The Justice Dept isn't looking for kids searching for porn (at least not yet), they're looking for people searching for porn with kids in it. Now if the parent poster had said that s/he had participated in the porn industry as a child, then it would have been Interesting...
Of course, as someone else mentioned, this is really just the Republican administration fishing for a topic that they can use for election fodder, and of course, the Justice Dept, as part of the administration, is going to argue that Google's privacy concerns are immaterial and unfounded. I'm sure that J. Edgar Hoover had a similar defense of his FBI's policy of spying on Americans.
Google doesn't advertise on Google News, and doesn't contain entire articles. So, if people are interested in reading a particular AP or Reuters article, they're going to see the advertisements from the news site actually posting it. IMHO, the two reasons why the online news media are upset is because they're missing out on the advertising on their front page, and Google News prevents them from having a online captive audience, which is something the TV/newspaper parent has in their non-online media.
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Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?"
Most people seem to be unaware that Google Books is actually two programs, which were originally named Google Publisher and Google Library. Google Publisher contains books submitted by the publisher, and the publisher has granted Google the right to display some percentage of the book, and are listed as Limited Preview in the Google search results. This increases sales but does not violate copyright, presuming that the publisher's contract with the author allows then to advertise in this method (if not, that's between the author and publisher).
Google Library, on the other hand, are from books borrowed from libraries, scanned by Google, without permission from the copyright holder. If a Google Library book is in the public domain (mainly US books prior to 1923, or foreign books prior to 1909), the entire book is displayed, and is listed as Full View in the Google search results, this is unlikely to increase sales, and does not violate copyright. Google Library books not in the public domain (actually, some are in public domain due to copyright holders not making the required copyright renewal, but Google is not interested in doing the research), then the book is only displayed in Snippet View, 3 lines per search hit. The snippets themselves would not violate copyright, as they are small enough that they would likely qualify as fair use, no matter what. However, what the publishers and authors (represented by the Author's Guild) are claiming, is that any complete digital scan without the permission of the copyright holder, for whatever purpose (especially one when the book is borrowed rather than purchased) is a copyright infringement. Google is arguing that since they are not using the books directly, but simply using the scans to provide fair use snippets, it meets enough of the 4 rules the courts use to determine fair use. Most of the books in snippet view are out of print, so it's not likely that snippet view increases sales anywhere near the amount a limited preview does. IANAL, but I think the publishers and especially the authors will win a pyrrhic victory should the courts decide in their favor.
By limiting the number of pages of a book I can view, Google is providing me information under fair use (their assertion). Distributing the entire book (which they do not do), would be illegal. The groups bringing the suit, though, are saying that several highly relevent pages from the book is too much for it to be fair use.
The books scanned from the libraries only display 3 line snippets if they're not public domain, copyrighted books with full pages visible are books where the publisher gave permission, and are not involved in the lawsuit.
The gist of the lawsuit is that even though the snippets returned by Google's search would be fair use, the electronic copy created in order to make the search is an unauthorized copy, and therefore taints the end use.
I actually think Google has backed themselves into a corner. By limiting the number of pages of a book you can view, they are pretty much admitting that it's illegal.
Google Books is comprised of two sources, Google Library, which scans books and displays the entire book if it's public domain, or a 3 line snippet if not, and Google Publisher, where the publisher provides the source of the book (well, Google might do the scanning with the permission of the publisher), and the publisher tells Google what percentage of the book is viewable. Any book found in Google Books that has a limited view is available by permission of the publisher, and therefore not applicable to the suit. Only books with a snippet view are of concern with the lawsuit as they are the only ones where Google might need permission from the copyright holder.
The publishers argument is that the public libraries paid the publisher for a copy of the book, and Google didn't. Those books in the library are only freely available because members of the community supporting the library (i.e., taxpayers, alumni, students) loan them out (or make them available for general use within the library).
The publishers aren't objecting to Google putting up public domain books, they're objecting to Google borrowing copyrighted library books, scanning them and then putting snippets up on the Internet. The case boils down to whether the Supreme Court will consider Google's actions fair use (and regardless of the original rulings, it will be appealed up to the Supreme Court). Personally, I think the publishers and Author's Guild are trying to stop something that will be ultimately advantageous to them, but I'm sure they're trying to establish boundaries that are favorable to them (and, of course, to extract money out of Google).
The original images Google made available were really low quality, about 75 DPI black and white, and the Open Content Alliance's images will be about 400 DPI color (Yahoo! and MSN are contributing to OCA). Volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/ have been scraping images from Google since they started the Google Books (Library) project. Now that Google makes PDF files with higher resolution black and white images available, the images work better with the OCR programs used by the DP volunteers, but it's still not as high a resolution as OCA's. Google has made over 100,000 public domain books available in full view mode, but quality control has been rather spotty. Most books with illustrated plates are missing the illustrations and/or pages around the illustrations.
Any scraping done by a competitor would need to have people doing some portion of the scraping, as Google either requires CAPTCHA responses or blocks all access from IP addresses/ranges where they detect signs of scraping.
Google Books has two distinct sources, libraries and publishers. If a book is scanned from a library, it is either classified as public domain (1922 or earlier in the US, 1865 or earlier elsewhere), the book is fully viewable a page at a time, and in some cases a PDF of the entire book is also available (presumably Google will provide PDFs of all public domain books eventually). Library books that are not public domain can only be viewed in snippet form, 3 lines at a time. If the book source is provided by a publisher, the publisher determines how much of the book can be viewed, from as little as the title page, table of contents and a sample page, to the entire book. Unfortunately, Google takes the word of the publisher, and if the publisher wants to claim that their copy of "Alice in Wonderland", using the Tenniel illustrations is copyrighted, you're only going to see a few pages.
There are plenty of ways for publishers to add a snippet of copyrighted material to a book, from the cover art and blurb, to a short introduction, but sometimes they just lie and slap on a copyright anyway. I know of at least two companies who appear to be only in the business of reprinting public domain works, claiming copyright and using Google Books to advertise.
I think it's time some Los Angeles residents start picketing Jerry Vlasak and his wife Pamelyn Ferdin (another animal-rights extremist), and leaf-letting his neighborhood with claims that they are terrorists and/or terrorist supporters, so that they can get a taste of their own medicine.
Further information contact information for them can be found at http://www.targetofopportunity.com/adl.htm.
Great! This means I'm not necessarily contributing to Spam 2.0 when I proofread at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/!
Yes, Discover takes a bigger percentage from the retailer than Mastercard or Visa, which is why not everyone accepts Discover. However, if you're using a Mastercard or Visa, and not in a reward program, you're just giving the credit card issuer additional profit, because the retailer pays a fixed rate regardless of any reward program associated with the card. If you only pay by cash, feel free to ask for a pay-by-cash discount. Some retailers will give you one if you ask.
While it's true that merchants generally pay a larger percentage for charges with American Express and Discover, the amount they pay for a Visa or Mastercard charge is not tied to the rewards offered by individual bank. That's the bank's cost of marketing, and lowers the bank's profit, not the retailer's.
*In the credit card industry, deadbeats are people who pay off their credit cards every month, which means the bank makes little or no profit on them. Of course, if everyone were a deadbeat, it would be nearly impossible to find a credit card with no annual fee.
For most credit card companies, all you need to do is call the credit card company and ask them to send you the form for automatic payment. One of the options should be "pay in full", if not, it's time to look for a different card. You just need to send them the form with a cancelled check, and in one or two months, it's automatic.
In the case Discover (the card I use most), you would have 1% of that LCD monitor in your cash-back account ($25), and you would be redeem the account in $20 increments. Choices include check, crediting your account, or gift certificates for various companies (up to $40 for $20 redeemed). Assuming I go for cash or credit, it's like getting a 1% discount on everything I buy. For your LCD monitor, unless they gave you a deal for buying in cash, it's like getting it for $2475 instead of $2500 without haggling.
As you've learned, you need to get into the mindset, the credit card is a debit card. Once you've treat learned to treat it as such (and I think the automatic payment-in-full helps), you'll realize the credit limit is irrelevant. I have credit limits much larger than monthly salary, and it doesn't matter to me at all, because when I am buying something, I don't ask myself "Am I close to my credit limit", I ask "Am I close to my budgeted maximum monthly expenditure?"
Theoretically, having one or two credit cards with moderate limits will give you a better credit score than having no credit cards at all. This could lower the interest rate you get the next time you need a loan (car or mortgage). I'm not sure that it's worth it to pay money to see your credit score though.
One last suggestion, move some of that money in your savings/checking account into a high(er) interest savings account, preferably automatically with payroll deduction. Out of sight is out of mind, especially when trying to maintain a budget. Only pull the money out of the savings when it's a planned big budget item, or an unforseen but necessary one like major car or house repair.
You'd be better off dumping the debit card for a no annual fee credit card with a cash-back reward. Set up the credit card with automatic payment of 100% of the outstanding balance (it's easy to do). Depending on how much you spend a year, you could be eligible for hundreds of dollars in cash-back rewards. You've already developed the discipline to only spend what you have in reserve, and a credit card set to pay off in full is just a debit card with a 20-30 day grace period. The only thing evil about credit cards is that the credit card companies encourage people to spend more than they can afford, and discourage people from paying them off by setting low minimum payments and offering things like "no payment due" months (while accruing additional interest, of course).
What's your problem with online banking? I don't use it to pay off the bills, but I check it regularly to help keep tabs on my spending. That's no different from calling the automated phone system.
There are a few in-print books at Project Gutenberg, mostly distributable under a Creative Commons license. Cory Doctorow's works are there for sure, but I haven't looked lately to see who else is doing it.
Then I'd have do take the extra step of deleting the partition when I install FreeBSD. It would only save me 2 seconds, but it would save the PC vendor whatever time it took to install Ubuntu.
Maybe next time...
No doubt she was originally freaked out by an email informing her that there was a new email associated with her PayPal account.
No, BSD vs GPL licensing has nothing to do with this. Theo's irritation is that OpenBSD is having financial problems, and nobody using applications original from the OpenBSD code base, like pf and OpenSSH, is stepping up to the plate and paying OpenBSD's bills. If OpenBSD had been developed entirely under the GPL, OpenBSD could still be having financial problems, because a commercial application using GPL'd code is under no obligation to pay a portion of their proceeds to the developers of the GPL'd code.
Other BSD licensed open source projects, like Apache and FreeBSD are doing much better financially because they have large corporations using their products who are willing to contribute money and/or services like web hosting in addition developer time. So OpenBSD's real problem is that either they haven't found a corporate sugar daddy, or Theo's managed to sabotage any deals that might have happened in the past.
That's assuming a new edition uses the old edition's cover art and provides a good synopsis. That may be true for computer books, but it's usually not the case for fiction.
You're just wrong on all of your points here.
First of all, the OP was asking for advice on cataloging his library, not for you to critique his lifestyle. For all you know, he may already be contributing your entire salary to famine relief, and doesn't have your phenomenal memory to remember each and every book instantly.
Second, he may be a collector of genres that his local library and bookstores don't collect (or only do so on a limited basis), and many of his books may be ones that are not easily found at either a library or bookstore. Furthermore, donating them to a library doesn't mean that it will go on the library's shelves, donated books often end up at a "friends of the library" sale, and ones that don't end up in another private collection are recycled, so donating to a library doesn't mean that he'd ever get a chance to reread them should he desire to later.
In order to stay on topic, I have tried Readerware, and while I thought it was OK, I never quite brought myself to go from using it on a trial basis to buying the product. I liked the download from internet features. I thought it was slow at internet lookups, but that's probably so that it wouldn't overload the servers it was querying. I was doing batch loads with a Cue Cat scanner, and I'm not sure if I ever tried a one-at-a-time load to see if it has a background query. If you're using it to verify that you aren't accidentally buying something you already have (or even trying to track down the rest of the books in a series), and you have a PDA, make sure that the PDA client can handle 3000 entry database. Many PDA DBs choke on that size DBs.
The final paragraph of TFA says it all, what sells is a functional website. IMHO, anything requiring flash+javascript is usually neither functional nor pretty.
I find it hard to believe that FreeBSD is saying that IE is not dead.
Whoops, got caught not reading TFA. What a waste of government money.
If this was rating Funny, instead of Interesting, I'd have passed it by. The Justice Dept isn't looking for kids searching for porn (at least not yet), they're looking for people searching for porn with kids in it. Now if the parent poster had said that s/he had participated in the porn industry as a child, then it would have been Interesting...
Of course, as someone else mentioned, this is really just the Republican administration fishing for a topic that they can use for election fodder, and of course, the Justice Dept, as part of the administration, is going to argue that Google's privacy concerns are immaterial and unfounded. I'm sure that J. Edgar Hoover had a similar defense of his FBI's policy of spying on Americans.
If you're going to summarize TFA, at least read the entire article.
Google doesn't advertise on Google News, and doesn't contain entire articles. So, if people are interested in reading a particular AP or Reuters article, they're going to see the advertisements from the news site actually posting it. IMHO, the two reasons why the online news media are upset is because they're missing out on the advertising on their front page, and Google News prevents them from having a online captive audience, which is something the TV/newspaper parent has in their non-online media.