Entries tagged with “book search” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement

Mac Slocum
October 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Updated 10/30, 7:53 AM -- Publishing experts, bloggers and interested parties are weighing in on the Google Book Search settlement. I'll be updating this post as new material comes in. If you see something that deserves notice please post a comment:

Posts Added October 30

On the Google Book Search agreement
(Larry Lessig, Lessig Blog)

The hard question for the registry is how far they will go to support the range of business models that authors and publishers might have. E.g., Yale Press "Books Unbound" and Bloomsbury Academic both have Creative Commons licensed authors. Will the registry enable that fact to be recognized? Indeed, though the comment was made by someone from the plaintiffs' side that it would be "perverse" for authors to choose free licensing, it is perfectly plausible that an author would choose to make his or her work available freely electronically, but contract with one commercial publisher to deal with selling the physical book, or licensing rights commercially. That, again, is the Bloomsbury Academic business model. Ideally, this non-profit should encourage the widest range of rights-respecting business models. One clear signal about what kind of organization this is will come from this.

Posts Added October 29

My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement
(Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything)

From the beginning, this has seemed to be a major example of corporate welfare. Libraries at public universities all over this country (including the one that employs me) have spent many billions of dollars collecting these books. Now they are just giving away access to one company that is cornering the market on on-line access. They did this without concern for user confidentiality, preservation, image quality, search prowess, metadata standards, or long-term sustainability. They chose the expedient way rather than the best way to build and extend their collections.

Short Term Profits Over Long Term Principles; Google's Caving On Book Scanning Is Bad News (Mike Masnick, Techdirt)

... it's quite upsetting to see Google cave on this. The settlement does not establish any sort of precedent on the legality of creating such an index of books, and, if anything pushes things in the other direction, saying that authors and publishers now have the right to determine what innovations there can be when it comes to archiving and indexing works of content. Unfortunately, this was really inevitable. As was the case with Google caving on YouTube and the Associated Press, it becomes a situation where Google realizes it can throw a little cash at the problem to make it go away -- while also creating a large barrier to entry for any more innovative startup. From a short-term business perspective this might make sense, but from a long-term business perspective (and wider cultural perspective) it's terrible.

Google Book Search Lawsuit Settled, Fair Use Questions Remain ... (Sherwan Siy, Public Knowledge)

But while the legal landscape isn't altered too much by the settlement, the practical landscape could be. Rightsholders and other potential plaintiffs might view this settlement as the model for all future relationships with digitization efforts--if Google pays for digitizing, why shouldn't everyone else? Such a landscape might make a plaintiff more likely to sue, although the results in court, ideally, shouldn't differ, with or without this settlement in place.

Boondoggle in Google Rights Win? (Warning, Rant) (Erik Sherman, Erik Sherman's WriterBiz)

Going forward, people will buy books they want online and libraries will pay for access. Who gets 37 percent of the revenue? Google. Plus, there's advertising revenue and Google gets the same percentage of that. So for $125 million, it's probably nailed down many, many times more future revenue. This will turn out to be a pretty cheap business acquisition for them.

Author's Guild Settlement Insta-Blogging (James Grimmelmann, The Laboratorium)

The issue is that this is a class-action settlement requiring judicial approval to bind all authors. It's practically impossible for anyone else to take advantage of Google's terms without filing suit to obtain a similar class-binding order. Individual license negotiation -- the route that Google considered and rejected when it started the project -- is utterly infeasible. Since voluntary negotiation can't produce the result one needs to do comprehensive indexing, there's still no market for it, and this settlement therefore shouldn't prejudice future fair use claims by search engines.

Read more…

Microsoft Closing Live Search Books

Mac Slocum
May 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Microsoft is shutting down Live Search Books, which includes its book scanning initiative. From the Live Search official blog:

Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities.

Project equipment, resources and scanned books will be distributed to various stakeholders:

... we intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.

(Update: 5/23/08, 2 p.m.): Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive credits Microsoft for removing content restrictions and allowing organizations to keep the scanning equipment:

This is extremely important because it can allow those of us in the public sphere to leverage what they helped build. Keeping the public domain materials public domain is where we all wanted to be. Getting a books scanning process in place is also a major accomplishment. Thank you Microsoft.

Live Search Books, a competitor to Google Book Search, was launched in Dec. 2006.

Related Stories:

• BBC 2006: "Microsoft debuts book search tool"
• A Glimpse into Google's Book Scanning
• Google Opens Book Search with API

Google Opens Book Search with API

Mac Slocum
March 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Google Book Search has released a Viewability API that lets organizations embed book images, previews and links to Google Book Search results within their own Web sites.

A search result from the Deschutes Public Library in Oregon illustrates one potential use for the API: offering a "preview this book at Google" link within a book's library record.

Clicking the link brings up the book's Google Book Search result, which allows the reader to scan pages and dig deeper into book content.

(Links via Peter Brantley's read20 listserv.)