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Google Print Holds The Presses
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Fri Aug 12, 2005 06:00 PM
from the more-pressing-concerns dept.
from the more-pressing-concerns dept.
brokenarmsgordon writes "Google Print, the project launched in December to digitize the entire collections of five major libraries, has been put on hold until November. Google will stop cataloging in-copyright books until November to give publishers time to decide if they would like to participate and to mark which books they want excluded from the index. "
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copyright issues (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.w98.us/)
It will be interesting to see which titles will be available through it once Google Print is ready for prime-time use.
Re:copyright issues (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.geocities.com/smushmoth)
Google Blog (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.olivers.ca/)
It's actually kinda funny..
That's right: Google won't even scan any book copyright holders ask them not to, even though doing so is perfectly legal. It's as if copyright holders got to dictate what books get placed in libraries. Their short-sighted selfishness will cost us all, depriving us of our heritage in our online Library of Alexandria.
Re:Google Blog (Score:5, Informative)
Funnier if google said it (Score:5, Informative)
Google's actual blog is http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
From there we have:
"So now, any and all copyright holders - both Google Print partners and non-partners - can tell us which books they'd prefer that we not scan if we find them in a library. To allow plenty of time to review these new options, we won't scan any in-copyright books from now until this November."
So unless told otherwise, Google will assume they have permission to scan copyright work.
Google Print hack? (Score:2, Interesting)
The real question is whether someone has yet implemented a hack (as described in this K5 post http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/3/7/95844/5987
I am a student, and my reading list for next semester will cost me $1850 (Amazon prices). If anyone has any updates on the 'google print hack' I (and thousands of others like me) will be most appreciative!
(PS, sorry for posting as AC, but for some reason
Which books to exclude? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
I cant imagine them letting too many of their 'products' become free...
Yes you do fail to see (Score:5, Insightful)
You failed to see whether copyright is necessary to protect the interests of writers, why increasingly unneccessary publishers are asking for more money for cheaper books made on shittier paper.
You failed to explain why we need basic calculus 17th edition when nothing a schoolboy needs to learn has changed in at least a century.
You fail to see that most writers, coders, musicicans, actors, etc. get very little because they aren't annointed as the "in flavor" by their corresponding distribution megalith. These distribution chains are far less necessary than ever before, yet they we have never seen such a rampage against fair use, privacy, individual rights as we see today. All driven by your favorite media special interest group.
you fail to explain why a writer or coder is somehow more deserving than a plumber who cannot write plumbing 1.0 and then sit on his fscking a$$ for the rest of his life. People sitting around doing nothing their whole lives are just as indicitave of "imperfections in the system" as the unemployed poor.
Try working for a living. Done writing a book or some code? Write some more! If your product is worth it, and you price your code correctly, you will make enough money to support you and your family in non-extravagant way - like the plumber. If your project requires more people, scale up accordingly, but stop looking to retire rich and live the rest of your life like f-ing bobby brown and that crack hoe whitney houston.
Musicians, Writers, Actors are all the same, they want to hit the f-ing jackpot while the rest of us work our lives to support them. Arguments of utility to society are bullshit. how did brad pitt make my life better than the guy who unplugs the sewer, or the laid off engineer who designed my 802.11 pcb?
WAAAY TOO MANY creative types worship this jackpot mentality, thinking only about the riches they will win if they join the system. but most who swing for the fences miss and get nothing. How is that different than playing lotto?
Copyrights, patents, IPOs, etc. are not for regular people, they are for publishers, producers, lawyers, Wall Street types, and other parasites who spend their time getting between you and your customer while you spend your time working. Why let them? Is it because your reach exceeds your grasp?
Stop fighting their battle against individual rights for them. Stop helping them to plant spy chips in your DVD player and computer, "to keep you honest".Stop letting them sell you perfectly good hardware with broken software that is used to pull you by the nose where they want you to go. Stop helping them lobby for media taxes and keeping you from looking at your movie on the OS you choose.
In short, just STFU you pompous a$$.
"due to greed in corporate society today..
I fail to see how copyright represents 'greed in corporate society today' anymore than it would have fifty years ago when the writers and publishers would have also objected to this kind of thing."
whaaa..? (Score:2, Insightful)
Google has the same right to scan books as the web (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps it is the tremendous usefulness of Google that has kept it from dying underneath an avalanche of lawsuits for its downloading of websites, but whatever the case Google is a company that uses other people's copyrighted material for commercial gain.
Is it fair use? It is to me, but I think downloading the entirety of a commercial work on an opt out basis is not fair use under the historical legal of fair use in the US.
It's all about the money ... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Friday January 23 2004, @04:56AM)
It's the money, stupid.
Good. (Score:1)
publishers' heads are gonna explode (Score:1, Funny)
Help make your voice heard... (Score:5, Informative)
Tor Books
E-mail: inquiries@tor.com
Fax: (212) 388-0191
Dead Tree:
Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10010.
Perseus Books Group
2300 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Phone: 800-371-1669
Fax: 800-453-2884
Email: perseus.orders@perseusbooks.com
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus/contact_
Random House
customerservice@randomhouse.com
Random House, Inc.
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 782-9000
http://www.randomhouse.com/about/contact.html [randomhouse.com]
funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad that Copyright takes so long to expire (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://en.xiando.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 18 2005, @07:44AM)
Silly publishers (Score:1)
Publishers, be aware... (Score:1)
(http://www.fevote.com/)
It's kind of sad that you really have to be in tune with the electronic world to know that fairly soon your books are getting copy & pasted into a public company's database. Hopefully Google's actually attempting to get the word out about this service to as many publishers as possible. A web page, blog entries, slashdottings, even a press release aren't good enough for the partly unwired publishers.
As a user, I like the fact that as much text as possible is searchable sans the books whose publishisers opt-out. But if I were a publisher, I'd rather have the option to opt-in to this public company's service than to automatically have my written products copied into a database without my permission.
Only Project Gutenberg is delivering. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.dpbsmith.com/)
Remember Al Gore talking about digitizing the Library of Congress so that a little girl in Carthage Tennessee would have access to books? That never happened either.
Al Gore talks big and the Library of Congress never delivers.
Google talks big and doesn't deliver.
And meanwhile, eccentric Michael Hart and his wild, impractical idealists digitize book after book after book.
About half the books on the Net, as indexed by the UPenn online books page [upenn.edu] were digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Hart drives all the eBook mavens crazy. He does everything wrong. He doesn't use Open EBook markup. He doesn't worry about conforming PG texts to authoritative academic editions. He doesn't posture.
All he does is get the job done.
Advertising Opportunity? (Score:1)
Danger: Google (Score:1)
robots.txt for books (Score:1)
(http://www.shoshan.es/)
That would be a solution publishers could use.
Who will write software to recover books (Score:2)
Beginning of the end? (Score:2)
(http://www.tk421.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 24 2004, @07:40AM)
- Oh wait, they did [pcworld.com] remove sources from Google News because newspapers complained....
- Oh wait, they did [slashdot.org] remove search results because of DMCA takedown notices....
On second thought, maybe it's not that shocking. Maybe that's why I predicted this in June [lisnews.com] and April [lisnews.com]....Google isn't doing this right (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
The contract with U.Michigan was confidential until they posted it in response to a request I filed under Michigan's freedom of information law. Google gets to scan everything, and U.Michigan gets a copy of the scanned files. However, U.Michigan is not able to do anything with their copies except to offer it on their own website, assuming that they take measures to prevent excessive downloading and automated crawling.
By way of contrast, Google gets to do anything it wants with its copies, forever, and that includes selling it to partners, or passing them along to any successor of Google. They will show ads for where to buy copies of out-of-print books. The entire book will be scanned, but only snippets will be shown surrounding the search term for books that are in copyright. With this latest announcement, they say that they will not show sponsored links unless the publisher agrees to join in the Google Print program.
Google considers anything published after 1922 to be copyrighted, except for government documents that had no copyright to begin with. Now they are inviting publishers to opt-in to their Print program, so that more than snippets can be displayed, and the publisher can get a cut of the sponsored links that are clicked on.
But you have to ask yourself, how many books that were published since 1922 are represented by current publishers who are aware of Google's plans and inclined to respond to Google's invitation to opt-in or opt-out? Consider that many publishers are no longer the rights holder once a book goes out of print, as contracts often stipulate that the copyright then reverts to the author. When Google talks about allowing publishers to opt-in to the Print program, or opt-out of the scanning, my guess is that we're talking about less than 20 percent of all copyrighted material that Google plans to grab.
The other 80 percent will be grabbed by Google without the "express consent" of the rights holder that is required by copyright law, usually with the rights holder not even being aware that an opt-out is available from Google. This is what Google has its eyes on, but it's not what they want you to think about when considering this issue. The used-book purchase links alone will be a cash cow for this 80 percent. Their statement that they will not show sponsored links on pages from copyrighted books that have not opted-in is not enforceable, given that they can chang their mind about that further down the road. It's just not fair to rights holders.
The proper procedure would be for Google to solicit permission for anything in copyright, and skip that book if there is no response. They should make an arrangement with some entity similar to the Copyright Clearance Center, and invite rights holders to submit permission forms for Google to scan their books. A license fee might be involved, so that these holders can get some compensation. The question of whether ads are allowed, or how much content can be displayed, could be negotiated as part of the license fee. Then if the library has the book, no one will complain when Google scans it. If it doesn't have the book, perhaps the rights holder can make a copy available if Google still wants it.
That's what Google should be doing, instead of ripping off every rights holder since 1922 by default. There is more on this issue at Google Watch [google-watch.org].
two different projects (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.lightandmatter.com/)
One is a completely voluntary project, at print.google.com, where publishers send Google hardcopies or PDFs, and Google indexes them. I've participated in this project as a publisher. If you want to see an example of Google print, go to print.google.com [google.com] and type in the search text "Even as great and skeptical a genius as Galileo" (with the quotes). It'll send you to one of my books, and supply you with a link to buy it. (Unlike most of the books in the progran, my books are also CC licensed, so you could actually download the PDF for free if you didn't want a nice bound copy.) The idea is that it's meant to help publishers boost sales: people search in Google, run across your book, and buy it. It's not meant to be a way to read an entire book --- they make it a hassle to do that.
The other project is completely seperate: to scan and index the contents of some libraries.
AFAIK, the name "Google Print" was only supposed to refer to the first (opt-in) project.
So far my experience is that Google Print is a complete bust. I sent them the printed books last year. They scanned them and OCRed them, and then said they'd go live Real Soon Now, which never happened. They sent me an apology note, along with cool little digital clock embedded in a blue doll that says Google on its chest. The apology note said it sould happen Real Soon Now, but that was some time ago. IIRC there was a period of several weeks where I could search in regular google, and and some of the results would be Google Print results from my books, but now they appear to have turned that off. (Try it with the quoted phrase I gave above, and it only gives links to my PDFs and mirrors on other sites, but nothing from Google Print.) Since people don't normally go to print.google.com to search, that means the program basically isn't doing anything right now.
It's breaking the law. (Score:2, Informative)
And just because the law is 'behind' modern technology doesn't make the law wrong.
This law is there to protect people and allow them to make a living off of publishing written material.
This could potentially steal a lot of money from the copyright owners. If Google _asks_ for and gets permission from the copyright owner (not assumes it's OK unless told otherwise), then fine, scan the thing and put it online.
But until Google has the permission of the copyright owner, they need to stop doing this.
Perhaps it's already been decided in court, but I wonder what the legality of the Google cache is. Technically, Google is copying and storing copyrighted webpages I would think.
While Google is at it, why don't they 'scan in' copyrighted software, like Windows XP, Solaris, etc. and make them freely available.
Or, how about copyrighted DVDs, like the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc., etc.
What's the point of waiting N months? (Score:2, Informative)
Google needs permission from every publisher for each and every book they wish to publish through the web.
Just waiting N months for complaints doesn't grant G any rights, no matter how long N is.
online print? (Score:1)
And now a for-fee download service, I would bite (Score:1)
They already have each book scanned (and by the looks of it pretty well formatted) so that turning them into any random e-book format will be a piece of cake.
They just need a deal, similar to Apple's deal with the music publishing companies. They will just send a cheque in the mail every month for the books sold out of a publishers catalogue.
And you know what? I would buy books that way. My Sony CLIE is falling to pieces, but its a dream to read books on in the train.
Amazon's e-book selection is the pitts, just business and some SF. And my personal favorite (http://www.baen.com/ [baen.com]) desperately needs to upgrade its website. Book publishers need a big kick under their butts, fast.
Not indexed - not sold (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/)
When you make a google print search, you get a box in the left for each hit, with suggestions where you can buy the book.
Sure, some people will not buy the book because they can get the small part they need from the scanned pages. But a lot more people will only know the boox exists because they find it with Google Print, and if the book is any good, some of them will buy it.
Books are not like music, most people will prefer the analog version over an online version where you can search your way to scanned extracts.
I expect very few publishers to "opt-out" of the index.
Re:10-15 year copyright limits? (Score:2)
The "knowledge" may be free, but the copyright will be in effect for at least another half century or so.
If you are saying that copyright should be 10-15 years after first publication, then I fully agree with you. But that's not what the law says right now.