TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Google Book Search’ Category

By Paul Biba

Earlier this month the conference on the Google Book Settlement, sponsored by New York Law School, took place in New York.

The cast of participants stood out—for example, Dan Clancy of Google, Carrie Russell of the American Library Association, Pam Samuelson, Paul Duguid and Mary Murrell of the University of California, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and TeleRead contributor Michael Cairns of Information Media Partners. The conference was expensive, however.

But now you can watch the conference sessions—including the tutorials—for free on the Conference website.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

By Paul Biba

In an Op Ed piece in the New York Times, Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and technology president, goes on for a couple of pages about how great the book settlement is for readers.

He makes the points that books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a black hole and that the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone but academics. Sergy goes on to point out how dangerous library book storage is, with normal deterioration and fires, floods and other disasters continually destroying them.

He says that, under the settlement, the majority of revenue will flow back to the rights holders and that participation is in no way compulsory. Further, rights holders can set pricing and access rights to their works, or even withdraw them, at any time.

He feels that if the settlement is successful others will follow and it will serve as a plan or precedent for orphan works legislation.

I think a number of his arguments are specious, but it is an important statement of Google’s intentions and should be read in full by anyone interested in the settlement.

By Paul Biba

That’s the premise of an article in Wired Epicenter by Kevin Poulsen. I must admit that I had forgotten about Google’s takeover of Usenet and its eventual abandonment of the archive.

Usenet contains the history of the internet and the rise of technology and Google acquired it in 2001. It morphed the Usenet archive into Google Groups and then combined the archive with Marc Spencer’s own archive of millions of posts. The two archives comprise 700 million articles from 35,000 newsgroups. I remember when this all took place and the excitement of all of us who had been a part of Usenet.

The problem, according to the article, is that the archive is broken. It is almost impossible to do a search, says Poulsen, in the Google Groups archive unless you have a direct link. It seems that Google has sort of lost interest in the archive and is making no efforts to revamp the search function, perhaps because there is no economic incentive to do so. Thus, the archive remains extant, but mostly useless.

The concluding sentence of the article is worth reading, as a caution to the hype that is surrounding the Google book settlement: In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

By David Rothman

While so many people fixate on e-book piracy, I’m more excited about something else—writers and publishers making money off “free” in appropriate circumstances.

Just the other day, a novel of mine benefited this way.

How? Well, I offer a free audio of several chapters of The Solomon Scandals—a reading that Tom Peters, a librarian, kindly made in his spare time for a blind friend of ours. Yep. Many would say that still more of the book should be on the open Web in MP3, and it might happen in the future.

But meanwhile a busy professor in a history-related discipline has already emailed me to inquire if the entire novel is available to him in audio. The professor is considering Scandals for as an assignment in his course, and he wants to audition the full book while commuting.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

While we reported news of the suit earlier, this is the first time that the actual damages have been specified. More details here.

French group La Martinière has become the first publisher worldwide to sue Google in court, demanding €15m (£13.8m) in damages for copyrighted books digitised by the search engine without permission.

The publisher is also seeking a penalty of €100,000 per day, and €3m for prejudice to its image. The trial opened in France on 24th September and a ruling is expected by 18th December at the latest.

La Martinière, which is backed by French publishers association Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE) and the French Writers Union, Syndicat des Gens de Lettres, (SGDL) estimates that the search engine has illegally digitised between 6,000 and 9,000 of its titles.

By Paul Biba

This is a unique post by Lorcan Dempsey. You really have to go to his blog and see the visuals of the word clouds to understand what he is talking about and I can’t reproduce the clouds in a legible way here.

While looking at Google Book Search the other day I was intrigued to discover that parts of my early oeuvre, such as it is, have been digitized from the University of Michigan collections.

I was particularly struck by the word clouds. Here is a word cloud from a 1991 work on libraries and networks with special reference to the now long forgotten OSI suite of protocols.

By Chris Meadows

Related: How do you track down specific e-books—and compare prices?

On CNet, Don Reisinger looks at websites that allow book reading on-line. As might be expected, he looks at quite a few sites but barely even scratches the surface.

The sites Reisinger covers are the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Books, AskSam, Bartleby, Google Books, Great Books and Classics, Perseus Digital Library, and of course Project Gutenberg. He does not mention Feedbooks, Manybooks, Scribd, or any of the countless others that are out there. But then, there are so many such sites that no article could list more than a small number.

The sites he does cover are decent enough for reading books on-line. But the fact that the article’s focus is on reading on-line makes it flawed, in my opinion. Almost nobody is going to want to read books on-line, from a computer screen. Downloading them to a hand-held device makes them much easier to read.

For all that, Reisinger does have a decent list of sites, and a good explanation of what makes each one great. If on-line book reading is your thing, there are some good resources here.

By Paul Biba

As part of a longer article Self Publishing 2.0 takes a look at Google’s Finger Spam and discusses why it is important to get quality control right if Google, and self published books are to succeed:

I only downloaded one book from Google Books this year, and it included more than a half dozen such image errors which I’m going to call “finger spam.” Google has come to dominate the competitive business of Internet search in large part because of their ability to fight spam. If they are going to be successful making scanned books available on demand, they’re going to need to start fighting finger spam as well. My suggestion is that the Google Books department appoints Matt Cutts their new editor-in-chief.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Google Book Search, Paul Biba, publishing, self-publishing, TeleRead

By Paul Biba

If you look at the drop down list on the Google page you will see that they have added a “Books” search option to the “more” listing. This certainly will make life a bit easier for book people. The picture is a bit small, but it’s the second one down on the list.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Paul Biba, TeleRead, Google Book Search

By Paul Biba

I find this really exciting. According to Wired Epicenter:

… Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.) …

On Demand Books suggests that book stores price the books at about $8, leaving retailers with a $3 profit after both Google and On Demand Books collect a buck-a-book fee. Google plans to donate its share to a yet-unspecified charity, which might be a reaction to its messy legal and public policy fight over a copyright settlement that covers books that are still in copyright. (All the books that are being added to On Demand Books repertoire in this agreement are out of copyright in the country where it will be printed.)

Technorati Tags:
Paul Biba, publishing, TeleRead, Print on demand

By Chris Meadows

In an interview with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressed frustration with the criticisms the Google Books settlement has received from all corners. He cites the years of negotiation with 27 separate parties that Google went through to come up with the current settlement, and the lack of alternative solutions offered by critics.

“I would like to hear from the critics a better solution to the problem as opposed to criticisms of the solution that we arrived at after four years of negotiation,” [Schmidt] said. “I read this stuff, and it strikes me that people who only criticize have as their interest the current status quo.”

CNet claims that Bloomberg reports that Google, a group of the lawsuit plaintiffs, and the Justice Department are now in talks concerning possible modifications to the settlement. However, the Bloomberg story (which has been amended three times as of this writing) currently shows nothing of the sort.

Google has already amended the settlement to institute a privacy policy and to state that books in print in Europe will be considered to be in print by Google Books too. But these changes have done little to quell the growing discontent.

I wonder what, if anything, Google can do to address the complaints. No matter what they do, they will not please everyone. As it is right now, the vocal opponents clearly seem to outnumber the vocal supporters.

By Chris Meadows

ReCAPTCHA, the service that error-checks OCR’d text while preventing non-human access to websites, has just been bought by Google. (TeleRead has already covered ReCAPTCHA here and here.)

ReCAPTCHA has already been used for some pretty large digitization projects, such as the scanning of the entire New York Times archives. It makes sense that the company doing the largest digitization project of all would recognize its usefulness in their efforts. Given how error-ridden Google Books’s plain-text versions have been so far, something like this is really badly needed.

Who knows? Next time you verify your humanity with a ReCAPTCHA, you might just be digitizing a tiny piece of a Google Book.

By David Rothman

TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba and I are both skeptical of the Google Book Settlement, at least as it exists now.

I worry about reduced competition, just as I do about Amazon. Nothing against Google. In fact, via a long-term investment for retirement, I even own a tiny speck of the company.

Meanwhile, in the interest of balance, I’d encourage you to come forward if you think we haven’t carried enough pro-Settlement news. Tell us about news stories and other items backing you up!

Writing in from Oregon, Kate Halleron says she is neutral; but she does point to a news release headlined National Federation of Blind endorses Google Books, as well as a Reuters story, Google to share scanned books with rivals. I know some librarians are wildly pro-settlement. Speak up! Personally, I agree with Kate that we could have carried more of the “pro” items. We’re stretched thin and try our best.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

So says the Bookseller today. That’s the Bibliotheque—the French national library—in the picture.

French Prime Minister François Fillon has endorsed the idea that Google might digitise some books and documents of the French National Library. Closing a government seminar on the digital economy last week, he said that "Google is not a problem, but a challenge". Fillon dismissed the recent uproar over reports that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) was in negotiations with Google. "It would be shocking if it (the BNF) were not doing so," he declared. …

During a roundtable chaired by Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, Google France chief Mats Carduner said he had offered to transmit to the BNF and the European digital library Europeana all the out-of-copyright French language books digitised by Google in the United States.

By David Rothman

Pot-and-kettle time again, eh? Details via Wired and Techmeme.

By David Rothman

The planned $125-million Google Book Search Settlement has drawn numerous last-minute filings, according to the New York Times.

Should Google be compelled to license its databases to rivals?

What if the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Department hadn’t made AT&T license the transistor without gouges? Mightn’t the entire tech industry have suffered?

That argument, by antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, representing the Open Book Alliance, is among the more interesting points made. What do you think, gang?

Related: 580,388 Orphan Works—give or take, from former Bowker president Michael Cairns at Personnanondata. Also see Paul Biba’s post on the state of Connecticut and others opposing the settlement.

Usual disclosure/reminder: I own a tiny speck of Google for retirement investment purposes.

By Paul Biba

Google has released the full text of its Google Books Privacy Policy. I haven’t had a chance to analyze it yet and hope to have some comments for you at a later date. It’s too long to reprint here, but you can find it at Google Books.

In addition there is some explication of the policy at the Google Book Blog. In that blog Google says:

As we noted in our letter to the FTC, because the settlement agreement has not yet been approved by the court, and the services authorized by the agreement have not been built or even designed yet, it’s not possible to draft a final privacy policy that covers details of the settlement’s anticipated services and features. Our privacy policies are usually based on detailed review of a final product — and on weeks, months or years of careful work engineering the product itself to protect privacy. In this case, we’ve planned in advance for the protections that will later be built, and we’ve described some of those in the Google Books policy. We have also covered several privacy issues in our letter to the FTC on Google Books. You can read more of that exchange on the FTC’s website here.