Google Book Scanning Efforts Not Open Enough?

An anonymous reader writes to mention the Washington Post is reporting that the Open Content Alliance is taking the latest shot at Google's book scanning program. Complaining that having all of the books under the "control" of one corporation wouldn't be open enough, the New York-based foundation is planning on announcing a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive to achieve the same end. From the article: "A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind's accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it's a company like Google that has embraced 'Don't Be Evil' as its creed. 'You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it,' said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."

funny.

[CDPatten]

anyone else find the irony here funny. Google is on the side of keeping this a closed circuit project and MS is part of the alliance trying to make it open.

Its funny. Laugh.

Google's got a long way to go . . .

[cashman73]

It's kind of sad to think that people are already worried about one corporation controlling ALL of the world's books. Let's still think about the reality of it. Google came to a handful (like 5 or so) of libraries (major ones at that), with a plan to digitize out-of-copyright books and put their content on the internet. They've got the search technology, they're trying to innovate. Now, if there were only five libraries in the entire world, yes, we could have a problem here. But in reality, there's A LOT more libraries than that. It's going to take a HUGE, MASSIVE effort by Google in order to digitize all the content of all the libraries in the world, and that will likely never happen anyways. More likely, some other libraries will probably partner with other companies in the future to digitize their content, and they'll be placed on the web. Yeah, Googlebot will probably spider that, so it will be searchable via Google. But so will the other spiders.

It would also be pretty nieve and stupid to only utilize reference from one source if you're doing research. You'd want to check out multiple sources to get the full picture. Of course, there is a growing problem that is quite common nowadays among an increasing number of college students that they believe that if it's not available on the web, it doesn't exist. Such students might find themselves somewhat, "enlightened," if they walked over to the library and cracked open a book or journal from, say, before 1995.

Re:Just Open Source It?

[SatanicPuppy]

I bet they won't.

There is nothing sexy or secret about the methods of scanning, but they must have put an imperial frickton of money into the process...To give the fruit of that much money away would be irresponsible to their shareholders...At least until they've made their money back with it.

Re:Google's goof

[DragonWriter]

Part of the fallout from the lawsuit has been that Google has done everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists.

Its on the short list "More" link on the Google search page, and results from it are brought up without special request for certain searches on the main web search engine (apparently, any with the word "book" that get hits, though I'm not certain of that.)

That's hardly Google doing "everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists".

Re:Good!

[s20451]

That way, in the event of a catastrophe or some kind of weird global event, it would be more likely that an uncorrupted copy could be found.

How do you plan to read it once you find it?

10 year disruption -- content formats have moved on; readers are scarce
100 year disruption -- hard drives, DVDs decay to unreadability
1000 year disruption -- even paper decays, unless specifically preserved
>1000 year disruption -- even if it's chiseled into a stone tablet, the language might be extinct

Re:Just Open Source It?

[Jherek Carnelian]

To give the fruit of that much money away would be irresponsible to their shareholders...At least until they've made their money back with it.

Only if you don't expect to reap the benefits of it afterwards and that giving it away might actually be required in order to reap those benefits. You know, kinda like how google gives away search engine results and email accounts.

Project Gutenburg

[larry bagina]

I'm a kind of baffled why people are talking about starting up new projects or Open Sourcing (tm) google's prject (whatever that means...).

Project Gutenburg [gutenberg.org] is open and non proprietary (ASCII text) and has been for quite a while.

After scanning, they use a distributed proofreading system where volunteers compare a scanned page image to the OCR text for errors. If you've got some free time, consider helping out.

Re:Just Open Source It?

[ePhil_One]

Thus giving it away is actually required in order to reap those benefits.

Quite the opposite. If they give it away, then I can set up ePhil House o' Classic Literature and reap the benefits of that advertising in place of Google. I can show less advertising because I don't have that nasty overhead of scanning the books. Google's need is to make it available to consumers in exchange for "eyeballs" but keep it away from me. Hammer away on Google's servers and they will cut you off, I ran operations in a company that performed such meta-searches and used to be able to tell you with a high degree of precision where that line was (which we considered business intelligence and thus wouldn't tell you unless you worked there).

And for the record there is no requirement that they give away the content to show you advertising, they choose do to so because a free service attracts more "eyeballs" than a paid service. It up to management to decide which combination of advertising vs subscription fees nets the most profit. Since Google best understands the "charge by advertising" model, the have a predilection for the "advertising-only supported" model.

So your grade for Google 101 is an F

Re:Google's got a long way to go . . .

[webbod]

Oxford University is one of the UK copyright libraries - it has a copy of every book and published in the UK and Ireland since the 1600s - it gets them by default.

Google says one thing does another

[SerpentMage]

One things that bugs the heck out of me with Google is their, "Oh we will do this because we have the rights", yet if you want to use their stuff you need EXPLICIT permissions. http://www.google.com/permissions/index.html [google.com]

" All of Google's trademarks, logos, web pages, screen shots, or other distinctive features ("Google Brand Features") are protected by applicable trademark, copyright, and other intellectual property laws. If you would like to use any of Google Brand Features on your website, in an advertisement, in an article or book, or reproduce them anywhere else, you must first receive Google's permission. We've tried to make this process as painless as possible."

Funny Google wants you to get permission and they are saying no such thing as fair use. YET they want publishers to opt out...

Google is hypocritical!