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Yahoo Competes with Google in Book Scanning 193

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the my-literary-collection-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
UltimaGuy writes "A consortium backed by Yahoo has launched an ambitious effort to digitize classic books and technical papers and make them freely available on the Web. The company is partnering with the newly formed Open Content Alliance, which aims to offer PDF documents of books to the public at no charge. Consumers will be able to search the contents of the Open Content Alliance's database and download the entire content of any work, such as a scanned copy of a book."
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Yahoo Competes with Google in Book Scanning More

Yahoo Competes with Google in Book Scanning

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  • RIAA Problems Solved (Score:5, Funny)

    by GreggyBUIUC ( 262370 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:07PM (#13707510)
    Someone start up a "Open Content Alliance" for music... then we can digitize and share it all we want.

  • Will Yahoo scan it like they have yahoo.com? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:07PM (#13707512)
    I can't wait to read the whole book on one page.
    • You jest, but I'd find that much better than pdfs. There's a perfectly good format for reading things on a screen how you want to, it's called html. I want to have longer lines on my huge monitor, be able to apply my own stylesheets to the document, etc. PDF is for printing.

  • no mention of project gutenberg (Score:4, Insightful)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:08PM (#13707526)
    I find it interesting that in all the articles I've looked at today about this that only one has mentioned Project Gutenberg. Naturally, I can't recall which source it was...

  • What a concept. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:09PM (#13707539)
    I liked the idea the first time I heard it - back when it was called Project Gutenburg. :P

  • What do these guys know... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:10PM (#13707542) Homepage Journal
    ...that we don't?

    It seems to me that they're throwing money at an unnecessary application. Does Yahoo know something that we don't? I'd venture that they're starting with PD books to shake the bugs out of their platform so the app works well in round 2.

    Round 2 (current commercial books) won't occur without a massive copyright law change or support of the Author's Guild.

    Hmm.

  • Project Gutenberg (Score:5, Informative)

    by timeToy ( 643583 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:11PM (#13707546)
    16k ebooks to choose from today, more to come, no Google, no Yahoo.
    http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]

    • Re:Project Gutenberg (Score:5, Interesting)

      by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:22PM (#13707630)
      More books are a good thing. Having a scanned PDF version includes graphics as well, which are missing from Gutenberg ebooks. So I see this as a very positive development.

      • Re:Project Gutenberg (Score:5, Informative)

        by timeToy ( 643583 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:49PM (#13707802)
        It depends, some book do carry graphics, for instance the Slashdot friendly "Amusements in Mathematics" by Henry Ernest Dudeney, 1917
        http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16713 [gutenberg.org] the Html zipped version do carry all the original drawings.

        • Awesome, indeed! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Grendel Drago ( 41496 )
          I remember seeing some of Dudeney's puzzles referred to before, but I couldn't remember where. Then the book popped up on my RSS feed (it was released within the last month, I think), and indeed, it was full of fun math puzzles. Man, that was nice.

          But they don't just have HTML; see various [gutenberg.org] examples of files released with filetype "TEI", including PDF (through LaTeX), TXT (in a variety of encodings, i.e. Latin-1, US-ASCII and UTF-8) and HTML.
        • They're a great group, but they've using some *really* shitty compression algos. :-)

          Format - Encoding - Compression - Size
          HTML - iso-8859-1 - none - - - 1.27 MB
          HTML - iso-8859-1 - zip - - - 5.95 MB
      • Well this is a problem waiting to get solved. Why don't they incorporate image-to-ASCIIart software so we can get high-quality images from these books?

      • best format? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by j1m+5n0w ( 749199 )
        Actually, I prefer plain txt to pdf if I'm reading from a computer (assuming the book is not illustrated), since I have more control over fonts and colors (and I have read quite a few gutenberg books that way). However, I think the best native format (despite its general user-unfriendliness) would be latex, from which txt, pdf, and html could be generated. On the other hand, I suppose it's much easier to generate txt or pdf from scanned pages than latex.
    • No images, graphics, no typography, no typesetting...

      Project Gutenberg is great and all, but there's something to be said for some effort made at presentation. Sometimes italics are a good thing.

      • Re:Project Gutenberg (Score:4, Interesting)

        by shellbeach ( 610559 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @06:41PM (#13708129)
        Project Gutenberg is great and all, but there's something to be said for some effort made at presentation. Sometimes italics are a good thing.

        It's not a great solution, but emphasis _is_ preserved in the etexts, just like that. Or occasionally like THIS ... Pity there's no consistency, but for most texts it works well enough.

        Also, the fact that they are plain text, with no markup, formatting, binary code, whatever in them means that they'll always be accessible to anyone, regardless of software or platform. And that's a good thing, too!
        • Also, the fact that they are plain text, with no markup, formatting, binary code, whatever in them means that they'll always be accessible to anyone, regardless of software or platform. And that's a good thing, too!

          I know about the problems that old file formats can cause. However, I doubt that formats like PDF or JPG will ever get "lost". There's just too much information stored in them, and various free libraries available with source code which read and write them.

          And if I'm wrong I won't live to see it.
          • I know about the problems that old file formats can cause. However, I doubt that formats like PDF or JPG will ever get "lost".

            My point was that since the emphasis is included in the file, you could always convert it to a nicely formatted PDF if you wanted to. In fact, I used to do almost exactly that a while back - I wrote some perl script to convert etexts to RTF and peanut markup language, and it worked pretty nicely. Keeping things at the lowest common denominator level isn't always a bad thing...

            Perso
        • Also, the fact that they are plain text, with no markup, formatting, binary code, whatever in them means that they'll always be accessible to anyone, regardless of software or platform. And that's a good thing, too!

          HTML would accomplish the same thing. It's a public standard, implementable by anyone on any platform, and convertable to plain text by a simple regex substitution. You're no more likely to find someone who can't read an html file than someone who can't read an ascii text file.

          • HTML would accomplish the same thing. It's a public standard, implementable by anyone on any platform, and convertable to plain text by a simple regex substitution. You're no more likely to find someone who can't read an html file than someone who can't read an ascii text file.

            I agree, personally. However, you could also argue that _this_ sort of emphasis is convertible to html with a simple regex substitution - my point was simply that the texts haven't lost any information. Ultimately, it doesn't really
    • Here's something Michael Hart wrote about this today. He's
      the founder of Project Gutenberg, and inventor of eBooks.
      -- Greg

      Yet another consortium of multi-billion dollar institutions
      has thrown its hat into the eBook/eLibrary ring today, just
      9 months before the 35th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg's
      placement on the Internet of the first eLibrary element, on
      July 4th, 1971.

      Last December 14th Google used a multi-million dollar blitz
      of television, radio and print media to announce the Google
      Print

  • Whew! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by op12 ( 830015 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:12PM (#13707555) Homepage
    I almost panicked after seeing we had gone so long without a Google-related article.

    The opt-in rather than opt-out strategy is really what Google probably should have done, but it'll be interesting to see who comes out as a winner, Yahoo or Google, in all of this.

  • But will they digitize PD works from after 1922? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:12PM (#13707556)
    In the US, books published after 1922 can still be public domain if the author was American, it was originally published in the US, and the copyright was not extended at the end of the original copyright period. Google Library does not seem to be making an exception for this, will OCA? Project Gutenberg does.
    • I don't understand this. My favorite book was published in 1956, and the author died just 7 years later. He had no offspring and he outlived his wife. Now would someone please explain to me why someone was allowed to extend the copyright and why the work isn't yet in the public domain?
      • I am not specifically familiar with US copyright, but copyright in most jurisdictions extends for 50 or 70 years after the death of the author. In your example, the copyright naturally should extend to 2013, or 2033.
        There are some exceptions to this. Perhaps most well known is Peter Pan which the UK has granted a perpetual copytright in favour of the Great Ormond Street Hospital.
      • Assuming the work was written only by American citizens:

        Actually, if no one renewed the copyright (renewal became automatic for works published in 1964 or later), it may be public domain. Read the new and improved Rule 6 HOWTO [pglaf.org] that the fine folks at Project Gutenberg have put together. You can put together a reasonable case that copyright was not renewed, and heck, maybe you could get PG to pick up the book.

        Or you could move to Canada and wait until January 1, 2013, when the author's work will enter the pub

  • Not really an up-stage (Score:4, Informative)

    by ChocoBean ( 890202 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:14PM (#13707569)

    Actually this won't "Upstage" google in any way.

    FTA:
    all the content will be made available so it can be indexed by all the other major search engines, including Google's

    Yahoo is just going to scan, scan and scan. We all already prefer google's indexing and searching and cleaner interfaces, so the only thing Yahoo! will accomplish by this is help google print along, sheilding all (other) copyright law suits. Once the stuff is online, we all know that Google-bots will be all over it "like a fly on a pile of very seductive manure (Zapp)"

    Excellent.

    I just hope publishers realise that in this case neither google or yahoo is trying to be their best friend.

    • I don't really think what Google and Yahoo are doing is exactly the same. Yahoo seems to be only digitizing specific books and text (probably the ones that Open Content Alliance has licenses to). In fact, it clearly says so in the article:

      Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. is setting out to build a vast online library of copyrighted books that pleases publishers -- something that rival Google Inc. hasn't been able to achieve.

      The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners

  • What about China? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:14PM (#13707573) Journal
    Will Yahoo provide sorted or unsorted lists of books that China's Internet uses view to the thugs that run China?

  • The difference between Google and Yahoo's effort (Score:5, Insightful)

    by doctor_no ( 214917 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:17PM (#13707595)
    Seems like the crucial difference between Google's efforts and the OCA(Open Content Alliance) is that Google has a "opt-out" policy for copyrighted material, while OCA specifically requires the copyright holder to contact them and essentially allow them to use the material.

    The OCA likely won't be sued by the Writer's Guild like Google, however, for searching material Google will likely be better being that Google's search will likely include a massive plethora of copyrighted material, legal or not. Also, it seems that Google themselves will be allowed to use all the material from the OCA into their project as well.
  • Why can't companies come up with some cooler ideas? Why ape each other? First Google and hten Yahoo, Sure MS will also want to play.

  • NOT competing (Score:5, Informative)

    by daniil ( 775990 ) <evilbj8rn@hotmail.com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:23PM (#13707633) Journal
    There's a slight difference between an 'Internet-based library' and 'searching inside books'.

  • Apples and Oranges! This is not Google Print! (Score:5, Informative)

    by merreborn ( 853723 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:26PM (#13707655) Journal
    Google Print's goal is to allow people to search book content, WITHOUT giving them the content of the book.

    For example, searching "Zoroastrianism" would return a list of book titles on the subject, and links to purchase the books in question. You CANNOT download the content of the book!

    The OCA (The group Yahoo just joined) is an opt-in, full content hosting project.

    Searching "Zoroastrianism" would return a (much smaller) list of books, with the *full* content of the book available for download with the explicit consent of the publisher/author!
    • Ahh, this is where it gets confusing. Don't worry, alot of +5 insightful comments on Google in the past few months have made this mistkae.

      What will library books in Google look like?
      If you are in the United States and you search for Books and Culture by Hamilton Wright Mabie, for instance, you'll be able to page through as much of it as you like, because its 1896 copyright means it's now in the public domain in the United States. These public domain books look very similar to publisher-submitted books exce

  • Sad thing about Yahoo though (Score:3, Interesting)

    by totallygeek ( 263191 ) <sellis@totallygeek.com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:26PM (#13707656) Homepage
    You will be reading the content to Moby Dick on Yahoo [yahoo.com] and in the top right it will say, "content provided by Google [google.com]."
  • I am getting tired of the big internet companies straight up copying each other. Yes, it means that products slowly get improved over time (eg. yahoo mail -> gmail -> yahoo mail) but it also means that the companies aren't innovating enough. Yahoo is spending time and money on providing a product that is already offered. We would probably be better off if they spent the effort on providing a unique service - like scanned magazines or something.

    • Re:Annoying (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 )
      I am getting tired of the big internet companies straight up copying each other.

      Should we turn to you to tell us which provider of each major online activity is the one we should all use? Even if the differences are incremental and subtle, I'm glad when I get to choose between Yahoo's and Google's take on a particular app/service. I'm also glad that Audi and Toyota and GM and Honda all have different ideas on cars... even though someone else built one once already. Come on - not every service offered is
      • I never said I hate the lack of choice. In fact I like it (duh). I just said it annoys me that there isn't more large-scale innovation - very few new features come out. Two large, multi-billion dollar companies should be able to do a little more.

        As an example of my point, two image search engines require double the effort of one, but only provide incremental benefit to the user. Instead of copying altavista's image search (which I still think is better), google could have implemented something entirely new.

        • Re:Annoying (Score:4, Informative)

          by Moofie ( 22272 ) <lee AT ringofsaturn DOT com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @07:39PM (#13708441) Homepage
          "very few new features come out"

          Have you seen Google Earth?

          How about the disaster wiki that went together in about 20 minutes, where people were posting status reports of New Orleans properties?

          I think you're damning with faint praise. Google, at least, consistently builds superb offerings, and the price is right. Not quite sure what you're grousing about...
  • will it take to download that PDF of War and Peace?

  • University of Calif: Yahoo OK, Guttenburg banned (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dananderson ( 1880 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:41PM (#13707754) Homepage
    I find it funny (in an ironic way only) that the University of California is allowing its public domain books to be scanned by Yahoo. At the same time, UC libraries prohibit scanning for Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] or other true "open" content projects unless they receive $$$$ in royalities.

    I hate to see a University pander to commercial interests, while at the same time, welcome commercial interests such as Yahoo. Money talks, and I'm sure UC is being paid a lot, but libraries are supposed to be public resources too, not exclusive profit-centers :-(.

    • Yeah, but can't anyone just take the online library text and put it in Gutenberg? I mean, it's public domain content, no one can sue for anything there.
      • The physical owner of a PD book (library) can prohibit scanning or even viewing. For modern books, it's not a problem--just go to another library. For some books it is a problem. Few copies exist, and they are scattered around the world.

        The library can require a legal agreement to view or scan the book, and that is where a lawsuit can occur. Of course, the legal agreement doesn't apply to 3rd parties that haven't signed. It's another example of the erosion of the public domain--it's not just Disney an

    • How can you prohibit scanning of PD books?
      • This is possible if the book is rare and the owner has physical custody. For libraries, this is usually through a controlled-access "special collection" area. They can and do prohibit scanning or transcribing of books, even if PD. They can require signing a legal agreement (license) with any terms they like, such as requiring royalities or restricting further distribution.

    • At the same time, UC libraries prohibit scanning for Project Gutenberg or other true "open" content projects unless they receive $$$$ in royalities.

      do you have a source for this? do you mean that a UC library tried to stop someone from checking out books and scanning them? or do you mean that they didn't allow the gutenberg folks to setup a scanning shop inside a library? there's a huge difference between those two.

      i work at a UC library, and i've certainly never heard of any policies about project

      • The source is my personal experience with the UCSD, UCI, and UCLA libraries. I assume the other UCs have the same or similar policy against digitizing books. Gutenburg is not a corporation, it's private individuals (volunteers). It's usually one guy (or gal) with a scanner, OCR software, and a little bit of time to proofread.

        would not surprise me to learn that a campus counsel or some such wouldn't let a library give away rights to content that UC held the rights to (like a library's special collections

        • the UCSD policy you cite says:

          Permission to quote is normally freely given, as is the permission to reproduce text or images for such noncommercial use as illustrating a thesis or a dissertation. The Mandeville Special Collections Library assesses a fee for the publication of reproductions for commercial purposes.

          which sounds to me like a non-commercial project like gutenberg would probably not have to pay the access fees. the other UCSD policy mostly talks about limiting duplication because it stres

    • I find it funny (in an ironic way only) that the University of California is allowing its public domain books to be scanned by Yahoo. At the same time, UC libraries prohibit scanning for Project Gutenberg or other true "open" content projects unless they receive $$$$ in royalities... libraries are supposed to be public resources...

      University library != public library.

  • Reading between the lines for this proposal we seem to have another print.google.com, except it will not index a huge number of works whose copyright holders do not "opt in" to the program. The advantage to this is that it may make some copyright holders feel better about the whole thing and, hopefully submit entire works to be viewed by the public. It is also possible that Yahoo is worried about the legal issues and want to wait and see how google weathers any legal challenges.

    From a purely technical pe

  • PDF?! yuck (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BillHop ( 82717 )
    Does anyone else find there is no way to read a PDF with the scroll buttons (mouse wheel, etc.) without the viewer constantly breaking your flow by jumping to the next page?

    This goes along with the concept that for an electronic format, I do NOT need a sentence (or even worse, hyphenated word) broken up by two inches of top and bottom margin filled with page numbers, miscellaneous watermarks, repetitive titles, etc.

    PS. This being flamebait does not make it false.

    • Re:PDF?! yuck (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fiver- ( 169605 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @06:11PM (#13707938)
      "Does anyone else find there is no way to read a PDF with the scroll buttons..."

      No. I just set it to Continuous. See those four icons in the lower right corner? (assuming you've got a recent version) Play with those. You want the second button from the left

      "This goes along with the concept that for an electronic format, I do NOT need a sentence (or even worse, hyphenated word) broken up by two inches of top and bottom margin filled with page numbers, miscellaneous watermarks, repetitive titles, etc."

      Well, the whole purpose of PDF is to "preserve the look and integrity of your original documents ... regardless of the application and platform used to create it." Blame the creators of that particular pdf file if you don't like the headers, footers and margin size. When I make pdf books to read on the train...I just finished Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath by Lovecraft...I open the original ascii text file in Word, make the top & bottom margins tiny, change the font to something tolerable and export it.

  • Bookripper on its way? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug@geekaz ... minus physicist> on Monday October 03, 2005 @05:56PM (#13707847) Homepage
    Google maintains its scanning represents "fair use" allowed under the law because it only allows Web surfers to view excerpts from copyrighted books.


    Soon after Google Mail was introduced, somebody created a SourceForge project that lets you use Google Mail as a database. How long until somebody releases a "Bookripper" app that assembles a whole book from search extracts? As I understand it Google displays two pages at a time (or wait, that's Amazon, but I bet they're similar). All you would need to know is a quote from a book's first page as a seed, and you should be able to grab the whole book by doing a series of searches using text from the second page returned by each search. The trick would be to knit the pieces together and eliminate the overlapping text. Seems almost trivial. Another possibility would be to search for random words and look for overlaps between the results, assembling them like a linear jigsaw puzzle until there are no gaps.
    • It's already been done. The guy was sent a 'please stop doing this' letter by Google if I recall, which I think he went along with. No formal suit or anything, but they didn't like it. I'll be damned if I can remember the link, I think there was a K5 story or two on it though.
    • Gmail limits the total portion a user sees of a book to 20% of it (it ties records of the book viewing to your google ID). No matter how many searches you do, you can't extract more than a fifth of the book.
    • According to Google, there are specific portions of each book that it will never show, making it impossible to harvest an entire book.

      I'm already logged in. Why are you telling me the page is unavailable?

      As part of our efforts to protect a book's copyright, a set of pages in every in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.

      http://print.google.com/googleprint/help.html#pag e limit [google.com]

      Dan East

  • "Do no Evil" done right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chunni Babu ( 920014 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @06:03PM (#13707883) Journal

    Now this is a right step towards making book contents searcheable online. I will hate to see one company like Google copying and caching all books in its massive cluster of servers. I know that Google kool-aid that "we are about general good" is running deeply in the veins of slashdot types.

    Since when was scanning books from libraries and making them available to public for a profit was considered "fair use"? This kind of stuff is done by pirates. Go to the major cities in China and India and you will see piles of copied book in the streets all sold for 1/10th the original price without giving anything back to the authors. The pirates can say that they are doing a favor to the authors by driving them out of obscurity.

    The message the alliance is sending out to the authors is

    • we are not for profit
    • we will scan your book only if you want us to do so
    • your book will be indexed based on your approval and copyright agreement with you and the publishers
    Compare this to what Google is telling the authors
    • we will scan your book, fill a form and tell us if you don't want us to do so
    • we will take sale comissions from amazon, buy.com, bn.com, etc. without sharing anything with you
    • if we show ads, we will share the profits with you
    • we will show excerpts of your book, so if a researcher is researching on a topic he can find what you have written about a topic without ever having to buy your book, too bad, heh heh, write a fiction book dude
    • we will cache your book in our servers and only we will reserve the right to profit from your scanned book
    So much for do no evil. Kudos to yahoo for bringing the open content alliance, gutenberg, and other similar projects to limelight - these are some really nice collections that were hidden by the noise created by 'google print'.

    • Compare this to what Google is telling the authors
      * we will show excerpts of your book, so if a researcher is researching on a topic he can find what you have written about a topic without ever having to buy your book, too bad, heh heh, write a fiction book dude

      Except that Google only shows 2-3 sentences of books that are under copyright. I've never found a researcher that can write on a topic by only reading 2 sentences. It's only posters on /. that can claim expertise on a topic without actually

    • [i]Since when was scanning books from libraries and making them available to public for a profit was considered "fair use"?[/i]

      It's not. You are mischaracterizing Google's system. The problem with your claim is that Google's system doesn't make the book available to users to download, it is only a search method that points to the relevant books and provides short excerpts like their search engine does. Google won't provide the book or even whole page without the copyright owner's permission. My impressi

    • Re:"Do no Evil" done right (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Since when was scanning books from libraries and making them available to public for a profit was considered "fair use"?

      How disingenuous. Google Print shows only a snippet of the text and tells you how to buy the book if it seems like what you need. Not pages, not paragaphs - a couple of sentences. In fact, Google Print instantly returns pretty much what you'd get if you hired a researcher to go find X number of books with such and such text and the researcher prepared a paper with a short quote from eac

    • Since when was scanning books from libraries and making them available to public for a profit was considered "fair use"?

      Since when is Google doing this? As others have pointed out, Google provides a portion of the work to give the search context - 3 pages. In another post [slashdot.org], you claim that 3 pages is enough information to invalidate the sale of a book. If this is the case, I would have to seriously question the value of your work. Either that - or take a serious look at public libraries, private loaning

    • Go to the major cities in China and India and you will see piles of copied book in the streets all sold for 1/10th the original price without giving anything back to the authors. The pirates can say that they are doing a favor to the authors by driving them out of obscurity.

      Interesting. Except for the cut-rate pricing, this is how the recording industry has been operating for a century.

  • This is huge. IA beat Google and Yahoo to this... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03, 2005 @06:04PM (#13707887)

    I've read through the first few posts, and people really don't have a clue about what this is all about. "Open Content Alliance"... It means what it says. Open f'ing content. Let there be content available to the masses... Is it more important that I can get a snippet from some copyrighted text, or that millions of children can read Alice in Wonderland with all it's wonderful illustrations.

    This is beyond PDF or anything like that. Some people want PDF, so Adobe will make them. Some people want decent OCR versions, perhaps to go into Distrubuted Proof readers or into someone's text-only PDA. It's ALL possible. This is NOT an exclusive club, it's an INCLUSIVE community that is dedicated to Open f'ing Content.

    Why don't you people get it. By allowing people to have full texts of some of humanities greatest works we are doing more than a few snippets of the latest Ken Follet novel... a lot more.

    It's bigger than Yahoo or Google. Yahoo is NOT an also-ran.... The Internet Archive has been scanning books and hosting Milloins Books project texts as well as Project Gutenberg texts for a long time... long before Yahoo or even Google were in the picture. Ignorant comments made here suggest somehow Yahoo is following.

    I say Yahoo is leading by embracing a project that by definition is bigger than themselves. Good for them.

  • New and Radical (Score:4, Funny)

    by Corydon76 ( 46817 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @06:46PM (#13708160) Homepage
    Hey, wow, that is completely original [gutenberg.org]. Nobody else could have possibly thought [promo.net] of this idea before [wikipedia.org].
  • Noticed on boingboing.net that a Chinese company is marketing a DRM-free version of an ebook reader [boingboing.net] using an eInk screen.

    Although I don't think it's on sale, it is the Holy EBook Reader Grail we've been seeking for ten years.

    If we're gonna download ebooks, we should have a reader to read them with, no?

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