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Yahoo Competes with Google in Book Scanning
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Oct 03, 2005 04:04 PM
from the my-literary-collection-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
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
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RIAA Problems Solved (Score:5, Funny)
Will Yahoo scan it like they have yahoo.com? (Score:5, Funny)
no mention of project gutenberg (Score:4, Insightful)
What a concept. (Score:5, Informative)
What do these guys know... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
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)
http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]
Re:Project Gutenberg (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Project Gutenberg (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16713 [gutenberg.org] the Html zipped version do carry all the original drawings.
Re:Project Gutenberg (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a great solution, but emphasis _is_ preserved in the etexts, just like that. Or occasionally like THIS
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!
Whew! (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://symbii.com/)
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)
Not really an up-stage (Score:4, Informative)
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.
What about China? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @10:49PM)
The difference between Google and Yahoo's effort (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Companies should Get Original (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://tarrysingh.blogspot.com/)
NOT competing (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday September 28 2006, @01:06PM)
Apples and Oranges! This is not Google Print! (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Sad thing about Yahoo though (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.totallygeek.com/)
Annoying (Score:2)
Re:Annoying (Score:4, Informative)
(http://moofie.lastcoolnameleft.com/)
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...
Finnegan's Wake, now available online! (Score:1)
I think if I read Finnegan's Wake or Hawaii on-screen, my eyes would bleed and tear themselves out of my skull. (not to mention downloading PDFs for days.) In that case, I'd much rather just go buy a paperback for $3. Then I don't have to read on-screen, the pages are conveniently sized and bound, and I can take my book to places I wouldn't bring a laptop. Like a bubble bath, bed, or my commute to work every day.
Yikes, How long ... (Score:2)
University of Calif: Yahoo OK, Guttenburg banned (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://dan.drydog.com/)
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 :-(.
Reading Between the Lines (Score:2, Redundant)
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 perspective, this system seems inferior in most ways. It only displays full text and does not give copyright authors the ability to show only an excerpt, or a set number of pages. Although, providing them as PDFs is nice. I wish Google would add that feature for works that are shown in their entirety. In general though, if I'm looking for particular data I don't see why I'd use yahoo which will have a much smaller index of work.
PDF?! yuck (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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
Bookripper on its way? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.geekazon.com/)
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.
"Do no Evil" done right (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday October 10 2005, @01:10PM)
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'.This is huge. IA beat Google and Yahoo to this... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Competition is good (Score:1)
Opendocument? (Score:1, Troll)
(http://slashdot.org/~Spy+der+Mann/journal/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 15, @12:57AM)
Just wondering.
New and Radical (Score:4, Funny)
(http://drunkcoder.com/)
A DRM-free e-Ink e-book reader on the horizon (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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?
Yahoo does not compete (Score:1)
Google is safe.
I give 'em three years and they're toast.
Bad Redundancy (Score:1)
No amount of computer resources can make up for human inefficiency.
That's a lot of scanning (Score:1)
Instead of scanning, why not useful tools? (Score:1)
Userfriendly sums it up pretty well.. (Score:1)
(http://www.icanseethefuture.com/)
Re:Why PDF? (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that it's an open, documented [adobe.com] format?
Adobe has made their money the old-fashioned way, by making tools that work well, rather than by locking people into a format. GhostScript, among others, will read those PDF's with or without Adobe.
Re:Dupe (Score:1)
Re:Dupe (Score:4, Funny)
If Google rose to the competition (Score:2)
If there was ever anything we need competition in, it is search engines. Whether project Gutenberg needed any competition is another question.
I don't see a lot of similarity between this project and the one Google is doing. Open versus proprietary. Free (free as in speech) information versus non-free information.
In the case of other search engines Google has put out of business (Altavista, although the web site still exists, no longer exists as the more-advanced search engine it was using the facilities of others), the competition did not make them improve at all, beyond their insight to make searching a popularity contest instead of an accurate search.
Re:its to see... (Score:4, Insightful)
I just wonder how Yahoo! will make $$$ of this very small market of public domain works, or if they DO get repro rights to other books what the price model is to download them, or will you just see advertisements in your e-books? The authors are not going to give up their $$$ nor is Yahoo so somebody is going to have to pay for this content.
Re:Google/Yahoo (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:that one thing (Score:1)
Library
Library
Library
Re:Why PDF? (Score:2)
(http://www.ciar.org/ttk | Last Journal: Monday October 15, @05:30PM)
You're right, sorta. The djvu [freshmeat.net] format is better than PDF for scanned books in most respects. Looks better, compresses better (and compresses by default), decompresses + renders faster while using less memory, more easily transformed to/from other formats due to availability of high-quality open source and free tools, etc. The Internet Archive's books collection has several books archived in djvu format.
The downside is that most users do not have a djvu reader installed on their computers, and even though it's trivial to download and install djview for free, most people will not bother. The Internet Archive more or less solves this problem with a java applet which turns users' web browsers into djvu readers. This should work for other content providers as well, except nobody knows about it, so everyone stops at "oh no, nobody has a viewer installed". The end.
On a slightly different note, though, PDF isn't that bad. It's an open format, and even though most people seem to think Acrobat is the only viewer, there are others like xpdf, which is faster, more stable, and easier to use than Acrobat (though not as fully-featured).
-- TTK