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Google Businesses The Internet Education

Google Opens Digital Library to EU 70

Posted by Zonk from the library-around-the-world dept.
Kailash Nadh writes "Google Inc. is asking European book publishers to submit non-English material to its Internet-leading search engine a move that may ease worries about the company's digital library relying too heavily on Anglo-American content. The Google Print undertaking represents a major piece of Google's effort to convert printed material into a digital format so it can be called up from any computing device with an Internet connection. By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue."
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Google Opens Digital Library to EU More

Google Opens Digital Library to EU

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  • pm (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Google Inc. is asking European book publishers to submit non-English material to its Internet-leading search engine a move that may ease worries about the company's digital library relying too heavily on Anglo-American content.

    Premiere message!
  • If it weren't for the non-English books at my college library (Rutgers), I don't know what I would have done. All the English books were stolen, vandalized, or had pages torn out (partially stolen?).

    Similarly, maybe the foreign language servers will has less traffic and it will be easier to get the info I need.

    I'm glad I can read more than one language.

    • glad I can read more than one language.

      I can read English and a lot of latin derived languages (italian, french, portuguese...) but I prefer to read spanish, I undertand it better and can read it faster than all the others.
      There are only some texts, like poetry, that are better readed in its original languaje.

      So I think thats its a great idea having a Europen Google Library, but I don't think that it's very useful for english-speaking countries but all the other non-english.

  • Why thank you, Captain Obvious! (Score:4, Funny)

    by L. VeGas ( 580015 ) on Friday September 02, 2005 @12:41PM (#13464642) Homepage Journal
    "By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue.

    I thought they were doing it because they wanted to show off.
  • I've heard that some people were complaining about Google indexing copyrighted books. Now this announcement will have many publishers scrambling to give Google their books.

  • fact or assumption (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Suppafly ( 179830 ) <slashdot&suppafly,net> on Friday September 02, 2005 @12:46PM (#13464681)
    By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue

    Is that a fact or an assumption?
    • I presume it's commentary. News sites do that occasionally.
    • It seems to me to be common sense.

      Fact: Google is a buisness.
      Fact: Buisnesses exist to make money.
      Fact: Google makes most of its money from advertising.
      Fact: People need to look at (and act (click) upon them) adverts for them to make money.
      Obviousness: Covering more languages allows more people to use the service.
      Obviousness: The more people that use the service, the more adverts they will see, and the more they will click upon. Thus, the more money google with recieve from their clicks.

      Therefore "By indexi

  • Interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by duckumu ( 831819 )
    It seems like the attitude toward Google is changing a lot. A few years ago I don't think we would have thought Google's motivation would be necessarily to gain massive revenue, but instead to create just a huge database for the public good...

  • Yet another move towards... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr. Sketch ( 111112 ) * <mister,sketch&gmail,com> on Friday September 02, 2005 @12:51PM (#13464716)
    This is yet another move by google to it's new product: Google Purge [theonion.com]

  • A lot of potential for translation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bedroll ( 806612 ) on Friday September 02, 2005 @12:51PM (#13464719) Journal
    If programmatic translation continues to improve then this could really be something huge. Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language, available to anyone who desires in their native tongue.

    • Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language, available to anyone who desires in their native tongue.

      Theoretically, this is already true for English speakers. In practice, of course, anglophones continue to read their own native fare supplemented by occasional forrays into foreign territory--but only if some celebrity with little expertise or taste recommends it, or if it will make you part of an in-crowd.

      Greater selection will not heal a culture of ill-literacy (

    • Plus with their learning translators, I would assume that published material is of a substantially higher quality than simply scanning websites.

      It would be easier to avoid summaries/fragments/slang/mistakes/etc...
    • "Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language available to anyone who desires in their native tongue."

      I fantasize in German. Do people who desire in a foreign tongue not get access?
    • This project will also be tapped (likely) to do the reverse: Improve machine translation.

      Recently Google's machine translation program performed significantly better [blogspot.com] than attempts made by other MT expert organizations.

      By having high quality texts in their database they can improve their machine translation. By having the same work in different languages they can significantly improve their MT.

      -Adam

  • Will it last? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alex P Keaton in da ( 882660 ) on Friday September 02, 2005 @12:53PM (#13464731) Homepage
    I hope that we don't end up getting rid of the hard copies for archival purposes...
    I am not a ginat Rall fan, but he has a good point in this article...
    Cultural Suicide via Digitalization
    Ted Rall
    NEW YORK--Compact discs won't skip. They'll play even if you scratch them. Unless you break them or set them on fire, they'll last forever. That's the sales pitch the recording industry used to convince America to switch from vinyl records to CDs. But, as anyone who owns a hairy dog or cat knows, CDs do skip. And as anyone who uses them to store computer files knows, digital data stored on them eventually vanishes in a mysterious phenomenon called "data rot." "With proper care this Compact Disc will last a lifetime," promised the packaging on the first digital recordings. Now experts wonder whether they'll make it 20 years. Without discussion or debate humanity has committed itself to the wholesale digitalization of its collective cultural and historical information base. Music, movies, manuscripts, everything from letters between presidents to merchants' financial transactions are currently created and stored in strictly digital form--a development that fulfills George Orwell's prophecy that history would become mutable, now with a few keystrokes. Even more terrifying than the likelihood that the digitalization of history will be abused in the service of tyranny is the certainty that we are setting the stage for the greatest loss of knowledge since the destruction of the Royal Library at Alexandria.
    Continued here.... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20050824/cm_ucru/afat eworsethandeath [yahoo.com]
    • If digital information was stored with the same level of redundancy that "analog" data is stored with, these issues wouldn't exist. In fact, even a low level of redundancy would probably be sufficient to protect against nearly all loss. The "analog" records you refer to can be reconstructed not because they were stored on paper, but because the complete record can be restored from a small fraction of the original, making the paper record much like a simple, but massively redundant, RAID array. With digital
      • Finally, the information in a paper document is fundamentally symbolic in nature, and thus equivalent to the corresponding digital information. It is not analog, because the information is stored as sequences of a finite number of discrete patterns.

        This doesn't hold true for music, movies or speech (which are not inherently digital) stored on CD, DVD, or other digital media. Written words, in a way, are a digital representation of speech/language, which falls somewhat between these notions of 'analog' and

    • Re:Will it last? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dvdeug ( 5033 )
      I hope that we don't end up getting rid of the hard copies for archival purposes...

      There is one or two copies of many books; one library fire, and they're gone. In many cases, they're virtually gone now; the only way to view the copy is to travel to where the physical copy is and get easily denied permission to view it.

      There is a film that shows a clip from an earlier film, and proclaims that it will be watched for generations. That clip is all that exists of that earlier film.

      There's no chance that any of

      • Long ago the BBC used to wipe and re-use tapes of programs that didn't get much interest or they felt had no long-term historical value.

        I recall that they only managed to recover some of the earliest Dr. Who's from fan's own recordings, even though the fair-use principles in the UK don't permit sharing off-air recordings and these fans shouldn't have kept them.

        The irony is now that they are trying to sue fans who got hold of the latest Dr. Who via P2P...

        They're also launching their own P2P service with DRM
    • Why would anyone bother destroying the hard copies? Were scribes and printing publishers in the habit of destroying the originals of the copies they make. The digitization of data is would make it easier to backup data to less mutable and destructible formats, not harder. The article you cite refers to digital media being pass/fail, i.e. either you can get all the data back from a medium or none of it. When is this ever true? With the right knowledge and training, similar to a historical art restorationist
  • We need more information available to us. As a student, I know how this works. I always get a great preview on a search engine, exactly what I need for my term paper, then as soon as I click on it, I need to pay $14! Outrageous! What happened to freedom of information? Google stands for freedom of information, and I stand by that.
    • As long as the books are under the copyright law, Google has to obey it. It is not a matter of choice.

      As for your freedom of information ... there is Slashdot :)
      • well, so long as the people are willing to let their information go, or if Google is willing to purchase the rights. Also, it helps to find alternative articles that are free.

  • Speculation (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Google Search
    Google Maps
    Gmail
    Google Library
    Froogle
    Google Offline
    Google Talk
    etc.

    It's just a matter of time before Google TV will appear. Google's goal seem to be to wrap itself all around you.
  • what's the link for google books? care to share pls thnks

  • Digital Libraries? What are book burners to do? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Safe Sex Goddess ( 910415 ) on Friday September 02, 2005 @01:13PM (#13464791) Homepage Journal
    If all the books in the library are digital, doesn't that keep the book burners from having their fun?

    On a more serious note, how does one insure the intergrity of digital collections. Things can disappear or be replaced with more politically acceptable alternatives.

  • Wow, really? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by re-Verse ( 121709 )
    Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue. I, for one, am shocked. I never expected that Google would try to make money.

    I'm also shocked that they are trying to attract more users to their website - thanks for this news. Until I read this, I was convinced that they were trying to keep themselves a secret.

  • Under an expansion announced Thursday, the Mountain View-based company opened its ambitious Google Print book-scanning project to publishers in France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands and Spain.

    The European Union is made up of 25 countries, only 5 (20%) of which are invited to submit materials. Clearly google was going not for the EU, but for all the countries in Europe that Americans heard about before or would consider vacationing in.

    Thank you for reminding us that as far as America is concerned, Europe

    • Re:Google did *NOT* open digital library to EU (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or perhaps they didn't want to tackle the whole thing at once, so they selected a few large, well known countries with languages commonly spoken and taught across the globe for their initial phase.

      By the way, your gross stereotyping of America is at least as bad as that of which you are accusing Google.

      Also of note: a simple search of print.google.com for Salmon Publishing (one of the larger Irish publishing houses) returns 11300 pages that are entered in the system.
    • It's now officially okay to forget about Poland, Belgium, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Latvia, Sweden, Lithuana, Finland, and Austria.

      Yeah! Now America's standardized geography scores will go up! (just kidding)

    • They've got to start somewhere. I'm sure they'll open it up worldwide eventually, there's a big market to reach.

      Submitter just didn't do a great job with the headline.

    • >>> Thank you for reminding us that as far as America is concerned, Europe ends at the German and the Italian borders (and doesn't include a bunch of countries even west of there). It's now officially okay to forget about Poland, Belgium, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Denmark, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Latvia, Sweden, Lithuana, Finland, and Austria.

      Thanks for enumerating countries of Europe. It's convenient to forget Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and H
  • i would love to get as much information as i want. this will definitely help me.
  • check out www.greenstone.org for a gpl application that rapidly allows you to create a digital library.

  • preylying (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 )
    I thought the problems that content overseers had with Google Books is that it's preying on content without sustainably compensating producers of it. Not "relying" on content. I guess it's OK for corporations to increase the value of content by sharing it, via the network effect, but not when humans do the same (often more effectively).

  • Desperate Move (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scottennis ( 225462 ) on Friday September 02, 2005 @02:40PM (#13465504) Homepage
    From the article:

    "By reaching out to European publishers, Google hopes to substantially increase the volume of non-English books in its database, said Jim Gerber, director of content partnership for Google's print program."

    What it should say is:

    "By reaching out to European publishers, Google hopes to substantially increase the pressure on big American publishing houses who have balked at their attempts to catalog the mass-marketed books that they make money on and which Google knows will draw shitloads of traffic to their site, pushing up their advertising revenue said Jim Gerber, director of content partnership for Google's print program."

    Oh, that's not the issue, you silly man, I can hear some of you say. But as a small, independent publisher who joined Google Print several months ago and who's books are still in "pending" status, I have to wonder why they would be soliciting European publishers when they can't seem to get my few books into their Almighty Index.

    Oops. Forgot. I'm a nobody. A small businees. Nodody really gives a rat's ass about my books because they don't come with instant recognition, branding, and millions of marketing dollars already spent.

    My few books may be quality, but they probably won't bring in the buh-zillion hits and generate the goog-illion dollars that the Google shareholders need to justify their $285 stocks.

    It's okay guys. I understand that you don't really want to be evil, it's just that as a publicly traded company you now have a fiduciary responsibility to be evil.
    • From google print help:

      How long until my book goes live with Google Print?

      The amount of time it takes to get your book online will vary, depending on a number of factors. These can include the current volume of books to be scanned and the complexity of your books. As such, we are unable to provide a timeframe during which your books will go live, but we do make every effort to get your content live on our site as quickly as possible.

      Your publisher account gives you a view into the status of all of your titl

  • I mean, I spend a fair amount of time in Germany (for example) and am routinely disgusted by the price-fixed bookstores. The prices of books in dead-tree format are ridiculous...so now what are those publishers going to do as material starts going online? Even though we're slightly talking apples and oranges, it seems like this would hurt them in the long run.

    Sure, they can voraciously defend their turf by aggressively protecting copywritten works, but what's the German timeframe on text going to public d
    • The Germans, as with most other European countries adopted life+50 decades ago, back when the U.S. term was still a fixed 28 plus renewal for 28.

      And the EU as a whole, including Germany, adopted life+70 several years before the U.S.

      Further, the EU adoption (unlike the U.S.) was fully retroactive, not just extending the terms of books under copyright, but pulling books back out of the public domain and under copyright.

      The sorry fact is, compared to the EU, the U.S. has a large and healthy public domain.

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