Open Library Goes Online With Public Domain Books

mrcgran writes "A competitor to Google Book Search emerges as the Yahoo-backed Open Content Alliance launches an 'open library' of its own. After several years of scanning and archiving, the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance this week unveiled the Open Library, their attempt at bringing public domain books to the masses. The Internet Archive has hosted texts for quite some time, but the Open Library makes fully-searchable, high-quality scans of books available, along with downloadable PDFs. It offers an experience designed to match paper: there's even a page-flipping animation as readers move forward and backward through the book. Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that when it comes to presentation, 'they already have Google beat, even with recent upgrades to the [Google Book Search] system including a plain text viewing option.'" We have previously discussed this project, though this is a bit more complete rundown on the initiative.

The real, fundamental problems

Have they solved the actual problems that plague online book sites? You know, lack of portability, bulkiness, ability to read on the toilet easily, and the ability to lend to friends at the drop of a hat? Are those solved yet?

Re:The real, fundamental problems

"My Nokia 770 solved all of those for me..."

Remind me not to borrow your Nokia 770.

Moon Books for DS

Have they solved the actual problems that plague online book sites? You know, lack of portability, bulkiness, ability to read on the toilet easily, and the ability to lend to friends at the drop of a hat? Are those solved yet?

Yes. If you buy a Nintendo DS ($130) and a Datel Games n' Music adapter ($35), you can read text files while sitting on the toilet. Support for books with pictures in them is still spotty, but at least it works for Gutenberg releases [moonbooks.net].

Nothing incoming

Yes, very nice and all, but, how will they get new works? It's not like anything is entering public domain anymore.

Where I can donate my real books to a library and they'll happily accept them, I can't donate anything to Open Library unless I own the full copyrights.

Re:Nothing incoming

Until in 59 years, when Mickey is about to go out of copyright, it is extended again.

Copyright is just like gmail storage: they just keep on expanding.

Re:Write some books

The old stuff, the dime novels and pulps of a previous century, classics that have fallen out of academia's sights, antique reference books and manuals... THOSE are the things most in danger of being completely lost. And no wonder, when the current generation can't see any value in preserving them, let alone reading them. Do they likewise see no value in other artifacts of history??

It's the old stuff I can't find ANYWHERE else that interests me about the Open Library project. Obscure? Maybe now, but not necessarily in its day. And regardless, that doesn't mean it should be thrown on the scrapheap of history. What is ignored today may well be tomorrow's classic.

Oh, there's already Project Gutenburg? A commendable project, and all well and good for plain text. But what about stuff like the very first book I ever looked at from the Open Library .... it had dozens of lovely drawings that would naturally be lost without the full-page scans (and for all we know, may not be preserved anywhere else).

The big advantage of such projects is that if enough people worldwide make copies for their personal archives, that's a hedge against the material being lost (via natural disaster, civil disorder, or whatever). We don't have to suffer another burning of the Library at Alexandria -- we have the means to spread preserved copies far and wide. Let's take advantage of that, not denigrate the archivists' efforts.

Exhaustion of distribution right after first sale

I've never understood why libraries are allowed to lend out copyrighted works to anyone without reprisal from the *IAA.

Because brick-and-mortar libraries buy and lend existing copies, rather than reproducing them for each patron, their activities fall under the protection of 17 USC 109 [bitlaw.com] and foreign counterparts.

Re:Nothing incoming

Oh, trust me, the various book publishing companies HATE libraries. They're constantly sending lobbyists to Washington in an effort to extract some kind of fees from libraries. So far, the various "library associations" have successfully fought them off. But it's a never ending battle.

Hey...

The more, the merrier!

I can't wait until all printed books have been scanned into public sites. I'm really into arcane mythology and religion and it is very hard to find original sources, and when you do you can't even check them out because they are so old!

From TFA...

"There's even a page-flipping animation"

That's it, I'm sold now.

Gutenberg Project

Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] has been in the business of hosting public domain books and other literary works for many years, long before either Google or this new thing. Gutenberg is much more of an "Open Source" project in that it is more distributed to volunteers. I wonder if there has been any coordiation between Gutenberg and these "big boy" projects?

Check out the demo site

They didn't mention the demo site [openlibrary.org] - check out the About the technology [openlibrary.org] page for a summary of ThingDB their new database framework - "a database that could hold tens of millions of records, that would allow random users to modify its entries and keep a full history of their changes, and that would hold arbitrary semi-structured data as users added it. Each of these problems had been solved on its own, but nobody had yet built a technology that solved all three together."

Printed texts are not going away

A few months ago, I attended a discussion forum at the University of Rochester that brought in a few well-established people from various professions in and related to the publications of books. The main topic they discussed was how new technology will affect the way books ultimately reach the readers. They talked about things like print-to-order books and walking around with eBooks on your portable computer as well as an online database of books that people can simple go to and read whatever is there. More questions were raised than answers given, but one conclusion that everybody there seemed to be happy to agree with was that printed texts are not going anywhere. They've been around longer than just about any other technology that is still used on a daily basis by millions of people. They'll be here tomorrow, next year, next decade, and I would be next century (unless we all kill ourselves by then). The next question has to do with their popularity. Surely, people would prefer to carry around a small 2-pound computer that can store hundreds of books than literally carrying around those hundreds of books. So at some point there is a shift in preference. I think that the answer of where exactly is that shift is still anybody's guess. Time will tell, to be sure.

Real-world metaphors and Interface design

I'm usually not a fan of on-line things trying to faithfully mimic their real-world counterparts. Interface designers do it because they're convinced that their users will be able to seamlessly transfer their real-world skills into using their on-line application, but most of the time the artificial restrictions that are imposed in order to stay faithful to the metaphor limit the actual usefulness of the application.

That said, I kind of like this, page-turning animation and all.

Maybe it's because it's intended to display scans of actual books, and so having them mimic the actual books they're based on makes sense. Plus the addition of search capability is something that a real book doesn't have, but it uses the tools available as an on-line application. I also like the subtle things, like the thickness of the pages on either side changing, so you can judge your position in the book, and the little tabs that help you find your search terms.

It's making me re-think my stance on real-world metaphors in an on-line setting.

Booo!

Only Internet Explorer 6+ and FireFox are currently supported. You should download Firefox or use Internet Explorer to properly use the Flipbook viewer.

So us Opera users are left in the cold, without public domain books to read? Fine. *searches for porn*

Bah

Page-flipping animations are a complete waste of time. Gimmicky interfaces are rarely good interfaces.

Translation...

From one of the articles

With the backing of some of the groups opposed to the Google Library project, the Open Content Alliance should experience smooth sailing.

In other words, the group trying to tie up Google in the courts is off doing something very similar on it's own. Typical outcomes for such efforts is to plod along offering competition to the product being litigated and in the process try to make the venture unprofitable for the target organization. Once case is settle out of court (or in) competing product is dropped like a hot potato.

Why would ANYONE trust Yahoo, MSN, HP or Adobe with content of any kind?

I fail to see what is wrong with the Google approach: I can search on content with strings. If the found content is not under copyright I have full access to it right away. If the found content is still under copyright I can at least verify that it actually covers the topic I'm interested in (as opposed to just containing a word or two in the glossary) and I can then procede to order the book, go to my public library, or whatever I need to do to get the information.

I love Project Gutenberg and the like, but considering the players involved this thing stinks to high heaven.

Of course Google could just make it easy on themselves and pull the plug on their efforts right now. Let these bandwagoneers do the heavy lifting and just provide searches on it all (which they are likely to do in any event).

My guess is though that this group will disband about a day after Google stops scanning.

We WILL get fooled again!

Re:Translation...

The Open Library is a Brewster Kahle project. Brewster envision, built, and funded the Internet Archive. He has been scanning books for a decade (with Raj Reddy of CMU) this project predates Google's by several years. He approached Google when he started expanding the Text Archive beyond the Gutenberg collection (which the Internet Archive was hosting), but Google wanted to do their own thing, one that would be more profitable to them, so he got funding from other sources. He invented WAIS, which was one of the first internet searches (it indexed FTP, Gopher, and early HTTP sites). In 95 he donated a relatively huge and expensive hard drive to the project which saved the only copies of the earliest usenet postings which were on rapidly deteriorating tapes. He has repeatedly challenged the DMCA and Sonny Bono copyright extension in partnership with Lawrence Lessig. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Unlike Google, there are no ads on any archive.org hosts other than the ones that were originally in the pages that are archived. As for what is wrong with Google's approach, they make gobs of money and never once offered any of it to the people who pay (either in money or time) to create the content. Brewster's goal is "Universal Access to all Knowledge", he doesn't need to say "do no evil", as he believes that goes without saying. He has done all of this while asking for nothing in return. So trust google if you want, I know Brewster and trust him.

As for searching, the text of the books is indexed and searchable, if you want to do a general search inside the book, you can use google, who usurps the rights of the authors, or you could use Amazon who only surfaces the texts that the rights owners have allowed to be indexed.

BTW A major coder for google while it was google.stanford.edu, was writing much of that code while working for Brewster at Alexa. There are rumors about the cleanliness of that code, but Brewster was never concerned about any of this, nor the fact that egroups, which started on another machine on the Alexa network, sold to Yahoo for $500 Million.

Is predates the google project

Brewster (IA) and Raj Reddy (CMU) and others have been working on this for almost a decade now, the Internet Archive bookmobile has been printing/binding books on demand at schools across the world for more than 5 years. They actually approached google about joining them before google launched their own project. While Brewster has made attempts to overturn the Sonny Bono copyright extension law (a couple made it to the supreme court, but ultimately failed), he generally doesn't like to push the envelope when it comes to copyright infringement, so much so that he has been accused of being a patsy. Which is really sad, as he has spent a whole lot of his own money and hours making more data freely available than probably anyone in the history of man!
 

That's Dumb

Having page turning animations is just silly. It makes about as much sense as raggedly tearing the edges of books or rolling up the pages to make them look more like scrolls. The point of putting books online is so people can read them not to foist irrelevant and distracting visuals from the physical world onto electronic books. If this was merely a waste of time I wouldn't mind so much but given the poor responsiveness of browser animations for many people this seems like a distraction to serious reading.

I don't deny that physical metaphors are a necessary and powerful way to organize human computer interactions. The trash can metaphor is a great way to communicate how the non-immediate delete facility works. However, if a metaphor is good people don't need to be hit over the head with silly animations emphasizing the point.

Just imagine if the default setting for windows or mac was to have a little garbage truck roll across your screen and pick up your trash (or recycling) every time you emptied it! Or suppose moving files around in folders was accompanied by sounds and images of rustling paper. It would be cute the first time you saw it but would quickly become pretty horrible.

I guess I wouldn't even be making this post if I didn't already have the feeling (true or not) that this project (or at least the funding..I don't doubt the volunteers have nobler intentions) is as much about sticking it to google as it is about helping people get information and read books online for free. A feature like this that seems harmful to reading but makes people go 'ohh cool' just reinforces that impression for me.

Probably I'm just being silly (don't read anything deep into my bias) but that's what it feels like for what it's worth.

Public Domain Books Only?

Does it support licensing options for books that author's want to keep some control over? For instance, can a work that is Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs be posted there?

Like Reins For Cars

The same way I don't want my parchment to reproduce the feel of letters chisled in stone or my book to reproduce the crinkled, rolled scrolls. Pick a way to present the material that plays to the strengths of the medium and avoids the weaknesses. Spend your time optimizing books for easy searching and display on laptop screens not reproducing an interface that works well for paper. It's not just pointless reproduction of the past it's actually a bad interface for reading on the computer.

A book has the wonderful property that it is easy to flip back and forth between pages. It's easy to estimate where you are/were in a book by the thickness of the remaining pages in your hand. You can perform what amounts to a binary search for a specific page with minimum of fuss. None of these are yet true with books displayed on a computer. However, computers can search the entire book in an instant, combine complex boolean expressions and display snippets from each result. A good book interface should play to these strengths.

Unfortunatly this interface doesn't manage to do this. While quite pretty the page animations make flipping through pages quickly even harder than normal on a computer. The search interface doesn't let you see all the results at once nor do I see any options for a more complex kind of search. However, I really like the tabs on the side of the book that give a sense of where in the book the results are located. That should just be combined with a flat list of results.

Of course reasons of cost and time mean that it is easier to present books in their original form but in 10-15 years this is going to look as silly as the early cars that offered reins instead of steering wheels.

Open duplicate

"We have previously discussed this project, though this is a bit more complete rundown on the initiative."

Congratulations on the world's first publicly disclosed open source dupe!

is this DRMed?

All I get is blank pages with a few non-working links. But then I only turn on scripting for kiddie sites and porn sites.

Why must I turn on javascript to read a book? I assume that it has something to do with lawyers and IP matters, but I hope someone can explain another reason that plain old HTML or text won't work. Deep inside I suspect that like many other content sites (YooToub) you can upload all you want, but you can't download.

Gutenberg has always suited me. Books I want to read don't have pictures anyway.

  and "you can check out any time, but you can never leave..."

Help the Internet Archive w/reCAPTCH

If your web site uses captcha, you get spam from posting your email address online, or you just want to help out the Internet Archive's book project, check out recaptcha [recaptcha.net]. It's a captcha based around helping recognize difficult-to-OCR scans.

-snarkbot

OpenLibrary.org web site a poor effort

I went there http://www.openlibrary.org/toc.html [openlibrary.org]. All I can see is maybe 20 book covers, most of them too small to read. There's no search tab or way to search the entire library (which AFAIK could be only 20 books anyway). The 'Table of Contents' tab is a list of sponsors, not books. There is a link to upload books, but that's it. This is how *not* to design a web site. If this is all they have, forget it. If this is a 20 book technology demonstrator, they're about to learn the 'Marimba' lesson: You only get one chance.

You'll do far better with Project Guttenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [gutenberg.org] has thousands of books, and (WOW!) the ability to search by author or title. If only OpenLibrary.org had thought of that...

Re:Books, Schmooks?

Unless it has changed recently, isn't whitehouse.org a site that is NSFW? Oh, you silly little troll, you almost got me. Almost.

Re:Project Gutenberg

I'm skeptical about the usefulness of that. There's nothing I hate more than having to wait for some animation before I can read more content.

You could stop complaining and actually go try it, you know. It is free.
The page flipping thing is pretty instantaneous. Backwards and forwards.

Gutenberg is the raw text. This is actual scans of the pages, incl illustrations. Looks far more like a real book.