Amazon, MS, and Yahoo Against Google's Library 144
anonymousNR writes "From the BBC, 'Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works. "Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle said.'"
Open X Alliance (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Competitor is kicking your ass at X
2. Form Open X Alliance
3. Profit!
Google does have a bit too much power. (Score:1, Interesting)
Knowledge is power. Letting Google control too much knowledge will give them a lot of power. Power corrupts.
Seriously, I'd much prefer an open database of scanned works rather than letting one company negotiate a deal.
Some has to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Some has to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
/Agreed.
None of the companies in this coalition had the balls to step up and do this themselves. I'm guessing they didn't think there was any money in it. Now that Google is doing it, all they see is an opportunity to take a shot at their competitor in other markets.
Note the wording of the writeup: "could make Google the main source". Not the only source.
Re:Google does have a bit too much power. (Score:2, Interesting)
Those companies already have an open database of scanned works hosted by the Internet Archive. You are free to use it and ignore Google's larger, indexed library.
Re:Some has to do it (Score:3, Interesting)
If Google diddles your page rank, you're probably just totally Bing-ed!
Ya know, I don't recall ever seeing an advertisement on television for Google products. Google is just so good, people talk about them, and everyone starts using them. I've not even seen an advert for their out of print books - it's just viral on the net.
Bing? Why do I need 127 commercials on my television to tell me how good Bing is? Hmmmmm.
Anyway - back on subject. Let them form their little alliance. People won't notice anyway.
Day by day old works fade away (Score:5, Interesting)
Their wealth abandoned and forgotten until the last copy is lost. Each was once a treasure, each contains something unique that once lost is gone forever. Who knows what nuggets of wisdom once enshrined in print might enlighten, inform, inspire or entertain a new generation? Nobody knows. We do know from dangling references in works of historical importance that a great deal has always been lost. Amazon knows that if people continue to have access to old books, they won't buy as many new ones. Microsoft knows that they must fight the Google on every front from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Yahoo, well, we all know why they're following Microsoft in this. And so this vile crew set their goal not to do it better but to prevent this service to mankind.
Google's effort fights the loss. It struggles to retain as much as possible against the inevitable creep of time. It's great, in my mind, that this goal even occurred to them. If some others want to compete in this worthy cause they should do so. But to fight against it is evil: not potential evil, but actual and active evil.
Count me with the people who don't see the Internet Archive's angle in this. It's basically taking their "archive everything" web idea and applying it to dead tree based data. If preserving the drunken mumblings of every blogger is important, surely preventing the loss of the writings of Arnold J. Toynbee and the host of others like him must be more so. Not everything worth preserving has been published on the Internet. Yet.
Re:Information/Knowledge is power... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're the second person to post some variation on the 'knowledge is power, and some people want to control that power' theme, and I just wanted to add that there's some real, specific reasons this applies at the present time to out of print books, for those who may think the meme is a little paranoid.
A few weeks ago, I read a book on higher dimensional geometry (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension - by Rudolph v. B. Rucker). It was published in 1977 in a cheap Dover paperback edition. In the back, there's references to a large number of books and papers on Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and abstract math, by some of the most famous names of 20th century physics (Einstein, Wheeler, Hawking, Everett, Minkowski, etc.) A tremendous number of these turn out to be out of print and unavailable through Amazon or other common sources. In one case, I was offered a copy of one work for over 300 dollars.
There are also a lot of books on the 'occult' side of higher dimensions in the references. Rucker isn't pushing an esoteric knowledge angle - He quotes from several of these, but he's often very critical of the misinterpretations of science found in them, and while he sees some interesting features in the works of people like P. D. Ouspensky or J. W. Dunne, he comes down rather harder on Carlos Castaneda. A little checking on these found a surprising number of them were in print or available online at low costs, and most of the rest were being offered free online from various occult groups websites.
What all this implies is left as an exercise for the astute reader. One example does not, by itself, make much of a trend, but it would be interesting if other such cases exist.
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A: because it disrupts the flow of a post (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually for this (Score:2, Interesting)
I like Bradbury's Farenheit 451 [wikipedia.org] better.
Over the years, the novel has been subject to various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of "factoids", partial information devoid of context, e.g., Napoleon's birth date alone, without an indication of who he was.[6][7]
The two works do have a lot in common in this regard, but I think there's a subtle distinction between manufactured truth and just disassociating the populace from the culture that gives them reference to make them apathetic.
The Internet Archive has been fighting this (Score:5, Interesting)
The Internet Archive has been fighting this, but not to prevent access to out of print books. They want get the same deal as Google - the right to redistribute out of print books unless the author/publisher opts out. What they object to is that the current deal is structured to give Google essentially exclusive rights to charge for access to out of print books. Libraries get one (1) terminal allowed to access the books for free; everything else goes behind a Google paywall.
This is really a legal scheme to make copyright opt-in again, instead of opt-out. Before various revisions to US copyright law, you had to register copyrights and renew them to keep them in force. So out of print stuff slipped easily into the public domain. Under current law, most material is locked up by copyright, even if nobody cares.
Re:Some has to do it (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's the constant non-strategy here. Google does something that no one else thought of, or at least no one else was capable or willing to dump resources into, becomes the early favorite, and all of a sudden, it's "hey they're monopolizing this, they're evil, let's gang up and stop 'em!"
But that's the nature of competition, and being the first one out of the gate doesn't always mean you're the first one across the finish line. Still, my advice to anyone getting into bed with those bastards in Redmond is don't. Microsoft only has marriages of convenience, and will either eat you alive or rip the flesh from your bones and discard you.
Article about the subject from Berkeley Law Prof (Score:4, Interesting)
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
Where's my "-1, Ignorant" mod choice? (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I will not attack your spelling, grammar, or punctuation in this post. It would waste even more of my readers' time, and be no challenge whatsoever. Besides, I'm surprised I'm bothering to respond to an AC at all, but I wanted desperately to clear up your misinformation.
My rebuttal of your post follows.
Firstly, a link is ridiculously simple to create, and greatly increases your chance of actually having the reader follow your browsing trail of breadcrumbs. Here, let me show you:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9zuFXqw12hUC [google.com]
Secondly, the page you failed to link to has the 1919 version of a book that was actually published in 1950 (twice!) and 1951. The three links at the bottom have access to full scans of all three earlier versions of that text.
Thirdly, There's not even a "snippet" link on the page you're linking to, so it may either have been yanked due to the slashdot effect, or perhaps it's not finished being scanned in? I seem to recall reading that this "digitize everything ever written" project is "in process".
Next, I will wonder why you are upset that you can't find any books prior to 1830, public domain or otherwise. Are you really upset that you can't find any books in this collection written/published more than 200 years ago? 200 years ago, humans didn't have electricity. Books were ineffably physical objects. A "searchable database" might have consisted of an entire library's known collected works, perhaps in a card catalogue - but more likely, catalogued (by hand!) in one of the tomes contained in the very same building as the collection it catalogued (the Network Administrator and "IT Guy" in me shudders at the thought of not having an off-site backup, but I digress). I'm not sure how long we've had mechanized printing, but it can't have been too terribly long in the grand scheme of things (sure, mod me uninformative for not providing a link to the wiki page for the printing press).
I will then continue dissecting this particular snippet of your post, wondering aloud (so to speak (type?)) if you intended to use the phrase "later than", as opposed to your wording "prior to" - the arguments you supply seem to support the latter. Your example, which you seem to be attempting to use to support your claim (ie, being unable to find the text in question) being published nearly 90 years after your "cutoff date" is confusing, otherwise.
To continue dissecting the logic here, you complain that you cannot download a scan of the book in question; I clicked two of the three links I mentioned earlier, to see if the "full scan" was available, and lo: there are links at the top-right side of the page to download the PDF.
Furthermore, I may be putting my foot in my mouth, because I just realized that the work you linked to is volumes 50-51 of the work in question, and since I don't read whichever language it's written in (and don't particularly care what language it's written in, to be honest - I can tell at least that it's Nordic, and were I interested in whatever the subject matter is, I'm sure I could find someone to at least help me get the gist of it (there's over 6 billion of us humans on this mudball, after all)), I can't determine which volumes of "Samlade Skrifter" are linked in at the bottom. I also didn't bother to read the page so I could see if it is described somewhere on the page (again, because I don't care). I'm lazy, whatever. Your example appears to be full of logic holes... My point being that there are easily half a dozen reasons why your whining does nothing to improve or further this discussion.
I'm all for freedom of information, don't misunderstand me. Cheering for someone who seems to be trying to do the same thing is also cool in my book (pardon the pun). Bitching because some obscure work that you're interested in isn't available *yet* (note the emphasis) seems worse than unproductive to me - it's annoying. If anything, we might be upset that
Google talks, BS walks... (Score:3, Interesting)
Much as I admire Kahle and archive.org, people have been talking about putting libraries online for decades, talking and talking and talking. archive.org has put a lot of good stuff online, but it's a grab-bag. Ditto the Library of Congress. Ditto university libraries. There are many places that offer interesting collections that make fascinating browsing.
But as far as I know, if you have the title of a specific oldish book that you actually need or want to read, there are only two places you can go with any serious likelihood of finding them:
a) Project Gutenberg
b) Google Books
I think Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo should shut up until they've done as much for readers as Project Gutenberg and Google have.
Re:Google talks, BS walks... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo should shut up until they've done as much for readers as Project Gutenberg and Google have.
Commit wholesale copyright infringement and hope that they can get favourable terms from a settlement? Yes, I too wish Microsoft had done this. Given the recent awards for sharing a couple of dozen music tracks, I think, as a member of the class involved in the Google lawsuit, I would have been happy to simply not settle with Microsoft, charge them the minimum statutory damages rate for wilful infringement, bankrupt the company and never have to work again.