What Ever Happened To Google Books? 70
An anonymous reader writes: Tim Wu at the New Yorker wonders about the present and future of Google Books. He calls it the most ambitious library project of our time — it seemed so promising when it started. Google developed the requisite technology, made the necessary partnerships to get it done, and put ridiculous amounts of effort into it. Despite their accomplishment, Google Books is merely a shadow of what it could have been. They just couldn't fight through the intellectual property issues that arose. "If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people's work.
Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public's interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer."
Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public's interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer."
Same thing that happens to everything else Google (Score:5, Insightful)
They lose interest in it and it fades away. Eventually it will be shut down.
Re: (Score:1)
This is missing the key component of Google shutdown, though. No one has based their life/work/etc around it to be devastated when it shuts down.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems that the simplest solution is to wait. And hope that Google survives various future and as-yet-unknown disruptive technologies.
Re: (Score:3)
It seems that the simplest solution is to wait. And hope that Google survives various future and as-yet-unknown disruptive technologies.
Frankly, I think the simplest solution is to copy Google. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing that. It sounds like a rather promising prospect for a good, real non-profit.
I must say, I am one of those people who did not trust Google with this. I think time has borne me out. These days, I don't trust Google with much of anything. And they have nobody to blame but themselves for that.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, I think Google have done some wonderful things like Street View and Maps and their curation of the internet into an easily searchable resource, it's just a shame that of late they seem to be getting more and more underhand trying to monetise everything.
Re:Same thing that happens to everything else Goog (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what happens when you have so much money that you can literally do anything you want. Nothing is important and you jump from one project to another.
Re: (Score:1)
Or: anything I use and love, Google destroys.
Re: (Score:3)
That would be fine. But they keep the accumulated patents and stop other people from picking it up. Bloody software patents. Also, Google can buy up any company with a good idea, and thereby stop them from becoming competition.
Re: Same thing that happens to everything else Goo (Score:1)
Even worse.. Libraries stop trying because they figure google can do it better than they ever could. Libraries shut down, people leave the profession and the net situation is worse.
PS: I wonder when google will open up their web cache - this is something government should have a role in also.
Re: (Score:1)
Even worse.. Libraries stop trying because they figure google can do it better than they ever could. Libraries shut down, people leave the profession and the net situation is worse.
PS: I wonder when google will open up their web cache - this is something government should have a role in also.
Don't you worry. Government already has a role in just about all the data Google has "cached".
Re:Same thing that happens to everything else Goog (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it's more like "it was someone's pet project and that guy left Google, and now nobody gives a shit about it anymore".
Re: (Score:3)
Don't be silly. Google couldn't monetize it. Takes a lot of work, and produces no revenue. Android was designed to boost ad revenues, which is their core money maker. Google Play makes revenue, but does Google own music, media, and other intangible property for phones? No-- just the YouTube banner ads and the sponsored results of search.
Apple has a pretty fat wad of cash by understanding somewhat benign monetizing of services. Google is not so smart.... or honest, IMHO.
Services and products are whimsical, u
Re:Same thing that happens to everything else Goog (Score:5, Insightful)
Projects like this exist for two reasons: (1) someone can make a profit on it and/or (2) someone takes a personal interest in it. Given all the legal b.s. that publishers, authors, librarians, and self-proclaimed Internet activists have thrown at anybody trying to put books online, it's hardly surprising when companies stop running such businesses. And all that legal b.s. also means that many people who would otherwise have a personal interest just say "fuck this" and move on to projects where they are subjected to less abuse.
What's yours is mine is ours (Score:1)
You took advantage of 3000 years of Western Civilization and what you supposedly "wrote by yourself" is now part of the common culture. So stop being a greedy little shit! We're doing you a favor!!!
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho. What's yours is mine is ours.
BTW if you had bought our stock 15 years ago you'd be a wealthy man. We have a pretty good business here, and I'm thinking of buying a golf course.
If I were king.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The last time somebody tried this was the Library of Alexandria [wikipedia.org] which required the dictates and commands of several kings. Even then they had to pay money to the Athenians to get some documents.
Knowledge is power. Power isn't easily shared.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe you meant, "Knowledge is power. Guard it well."
Re:If I were king.... (Score:5, Informative)
The last time somebody tried this was the Library of Alexandria which required the dictates and commands of several kings. Even then they had to pay money to the Athenians to get some documents.
Well, that was because the Library wanted to make a copy of the original manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Athens was reluctant to allow the manuscripts to be sent to Alexandria (presumably they would've preferred to have them copied in Athens), but ultimately allowed it provided that the Library provided a cash deposit to ensure the safe return of the manuscripts.
Instead, predictably, the Library kept the originals and returned the copies, and was happy to forfeit the money, which was almost 500 kilograms of silver.
The normal M.O. of the Library was just to require that all documents going through Alexandria be available for copying by the Library, and to be a major port and trading hub so that a lot of documents happened to pass through.
It all worked pretty well (for a library that relied on hand-copying, the printing press not being invented yet) until some assholes burned the place down.
Re:If I were king.... (Score:5, Funny)
It does show you that people have been ignoring backups for a very long time.
Hop to it folks!
Re: (Score:3)
They had backups. What they didn't have was enough off-site backups, though even then, they did have plenty. How well would your data hold up if an army killed you and destroyed everything you had? Would it all be safe, or maybe just some of it? Would your friends and family be able to get it all without your guidance (again, killed by a whole army)?
Re: (Score:1)
Put into concrete terms that a slashdotter could understand:
If the Islamists succeed and take over the world, who's going to stop them from burning your porn collection?
Re:If I were king.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The last time somebody tried this was the Library of Alexandria which required the dictates and commands of several kings. Even then they had to pay money to the Athenians to get some documents.
Knowledge is power. Power isn't easily shared.
Unfortunately, I can't read TFA because it's behind a paywall, so I'm not really sure what the article is complaining about.
However, it should be noted that Google actually DID convince a number of major libraries (like Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, etc.) to share huge amounts of their material. I remember the discussions among librarians when this idea was first being floated, and nobody thought they'd ever get major research libraries with huge amounts of old books to go along with it -- but they did.
So, while "knowledge is power," Google made great strides in getting big, old, rich libraries to make lots of their information available to the public.
Thus, to my mind, Google Books is still a HUGE resource. They managed to digitize and index a ridiculous number of obscure books, particularly from the 1800s and early 1900s. (There's earlier stuff too, but it's not as comprehensive or indexed as well, largely due to issues in recognizing old fonts and letter variants.)
For anyone interested in any kind of historical information, this is a goldmine unlike anything ever available in the history of humanity, even the Library of Alexandria. You want to know when or how some concept emerged in the 1800s or early 1900s? You can do a full text search of thousands of obscure books and pinpoint exactly how an idea emerged, was first discussed, and then spread. Heck, I've even made use of it to find when and how certain kinds of foods emerged, or when kitchen equipment became standardized.
A decade ago this kind of research required hours or days in one of the few libraries with large and comprehensive collections of old books. Now, I can usually get at least a rough answer to even incredibly obscure historical questions within a few minutes and a couple tailored searches.
That in itself is nothing short of an amazing accomplishment. Add all of the old resources that are still valuable -- we used to depend on Dover Edition reprints of old classic textbooks or standard classic works of both non-fiction and fiction. Now you can download almost any major book you want from before 1920 or so as a searchable PDF for free. You want a classic old textbook on math or Latin or mechanics or whatever? There are literally hundreds of them available, thanks to digitization brought to you by Google Books.
And then there are all the newer books -- I agree that there are lots of annoying books with no preview, but Google Books was the first place to bring you a full-text search to so many recent books, often with a preview of a few pages.
Again, for someone doing research on just about anything, this was absolutely amazing when I first began using it a lot 5-6 years ago. A decade ago, I'd need to go to the library and find a book, then scan through the index or page through it to see if it had relevant information. Half of the time now I can just do a full-text search on thousands of related books on the topic and often get a preview of the relevant pages instantly in one place.
The real unfortunate problem, to my mind, is the "abandoned" works on Google Books, books that aren't old enough to be in the public domain, but for which there's no clear rights holder available or easy to contact. The are huge numbers of great resources from the 1920s up to the present day which I can only get a "snippet view" of, if that. That's also a HUGE hole, but it doesn't detract from the achievement of what Google Books has done.
Just as one other random anecdote -- I first realized the true power of Google Books about 5 years ago. Part of my research touches on history of science, and I was working through some odd calculations in a 17th-century treatise. I was briefly
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Google was able to copy a vast trove of books. No, we don't really have access to them. Google should say To hell with the US hegemony's stupid copyright laws, and just make them all, without reservation, available from offshore servers for the benefit of all mankind.
Re: (Score:2)
The validity of the law ends not at national boarders, but at the ability of a nation to enforce them. We like to say that a country has no external jurisdiction - but counterexamples abound.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Google Books was and is the best thing ever to happen to some academic fields. People who study 16th through 18th century literature now have access to stuff in their offices that used to require hunting through libraries in Europe. I'm a historian and use Google Books extensively to at least locate sources -- sometimes I need to e-mail a library in Europe to get a better quality scan, but Google Books and HathiTrust, the non-profit consortium of libraries and universities that partnered with Google usual
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Regarding older public domain books, Google's efforts aren't very good, they get about a D for quality. You can check out the Internet archive, it has digitized copies of many pre-1900 works that were digitized by several companies independently. You'll find the company name in the files. I'm not a fan of M$, but their scans are way nicer than Google's. And if you compare with the works of some libraries such as the one in Goettin
Motivation? (Score:1, Insightful)
"If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public..."
Are you sure the motivation wasn't data mining?
Re: (Score:2)
"If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public..." Are you sure the motivation wasn't data mining?
The motivation probably wasn't data mining. If it were, Google Books would be a very big well-funded project.
Strike that. Reverse it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google.
Don't you mean, people assume that just because it's Google that it should absolutely not be trusted?
Whatever goodwill Google might have once had (which is debatable), they've long since squandered it away. They're now the used-car salesmen of the tech world -- no one trusts them at all.
I'll tell you (Score:2)
What happened to it? It's at http://books.google.com/ [google.com]
Re: I'll tell you (Score:1)
Google Books has been slowly reducing the number of public domain works that can be downloaded.
The hatnote claims the work is under copyright, because an organization published a copy of the 1850 work in 2014.
Re: (Score:3)
The frickin' Universe is a non-profit organization!
Re: (Score:3)
The Second Law of Thermodynamics would like a few words with you in private.
Conspiracy minded with good cause (Score:3)
> For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded,
I'm afraid it's because they've dealt with publishers and agents. They are _accustomed_ to being gouged by people who claim to be there to help, and a certain amount of paranoia is an evolutionary pressure for authors: those who don't practice caution tend to get out of writing very quickly.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't exist to serve you, they exist to serve academia; read their web page: https://www.hathitrust.org/htr... [hathitrust.org]
And it ain't going to remain free:
They WON! (Score:5, Informative)
Just fyi for the public, the lawsuit against Google Books was dismissed.
Google successfully used fair use as a defense and all claims were denied.
Personal profits to Google aside, they also scored a major precedent that will pave the way for future orphan works revivals.
alternative repository (Score:4, Interesting)
"If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people's work."
This assumes that non-profits are somehow honorable and trustworthy. I suppose that some are worthy but unless they are up front with their financials I don't trust them at all. The voice of experience.
OTOH, if Google donated the results of their acquisitions to the Library of Congress or other body above reproach, yeah go for it! I don't recall ever hearing of a lawsuit against the LoC, but too lazy to check.
Re: (Score:2)
Is that you, Donald Trump?
Re: (Score:1)
Google (or, rather, the libraries that Google scanned) have largely donated their holdings to the HathiTrust initiative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust
Re: (Score:3)
Non-profit status can be abused. Look look at any pastor of a mega-church for an example - lavish buildings, a mansion to live in, a private jet, huge salaries for themselves and their family, expensive 'missioning' holidays to exotic locations, all with tax-exempt non-profit status.
So true... (Score:3)
"Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google."
Such a true statement---and only Google makes this mistake.
The 'G' in Google stands for government (Score:2)
Some of us know not to trust the government.
"...assume that people will trust it just because it's Google."
With damm good reason (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason why practically anyone who had a dog in the fight, and many who didn't, arranged themselves in opposition to Google and the sockpuppet 'Author's Guild'.
And they had damn good reason to be so. Not only did the lawsuit verge on being a sockpuppet, Google was trying (basically) not only to get exclusive rights to the material, but also rigging the game so they paid a third party who may or may not (most likely not) actually represent the author or their estate. Then to make matters worse - there was no statutory requirement that said third party actually make any effort to locate the persons to whom the money was due. The onus was placed entirely on said individual to prove that they were in fact the rightful recipient (to the satisfaction of said third party).
It was a horribly bad deal for anyone who wasn't Google. And that includes the public - who would see what should be available to all locked up under the aegis of a single corporation.
Internet Archive - archive.org is the Future (Score:3)
OpenLibrary (Score:1)
A side project of the Web Archive is OpenLibrary [openlibrary.org]. I've checked out a number of old books there that I would never expect to find in any local library or bookstore!
Re: What bullshit (Score:2)
Heheheh... holesale
No staying power with Google sometimes (Score:1)
Unfortunately with Google they go from one project to another like caffeine riddled Wiz Kids who become disinterested very quickly in projects. I think its always been clear that Google with almost every project looks for a golden reward for its efforts. Rightly so given its a private enterprise that requires profits to survive, has a long list of investors and employee's worldwide. But in the real world people want to make money, the authors of books, the publisher, and the distributor.
But I also think ele
Legal uncertainty (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I generally agree, but that wasn't really what Google was trying to do. They weren't trying to set up some sort of general access for copyrighted works whose copyright holders can't be found, or to reduce copyright from its currently ludicrous durations, but to set themselves up as the sole organization that could make those works available.
I fought the law and the law won (Score:2)
Look, copyright means nothing unless it means that authors or copyright holders generally get to control what happens with their work product. Most of them want to get paid, just like you.
Sure patents in software are a national shrine to special interest, deep pockets lobbying against the public good. But copyright? Really? Libraries are the way we've worked this very issue out. Libraries work. Get a card.
Google thought it could just strong arm aside all those vibrant, diverse geniuses who wrote all those i