Google Book Search

"Excuse me, where is the Google Terminal?"

October 31, 2008

As expected, the proposed Google Book Search settlement has led to a lot of scrutiny, criticism and questions. Here is a link to the 125 page Settlement Agreement(without attachments; pdf). Here is a link to the page that holds the full agreement which, with attachments, is over 300 pages long). Both Larry Lessig (“IMHO, this is a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic”) and Wade Roush(“Book Search settlement contains some major disappointments”) have taken a first crack at trying to decipher this settlement (Roush – “exhaustive, labyrinthine”) and figure out who, amongst the many stakeholders, are the winners and losers. Here is a particularly interesting paragraph from Wade Roush’s article: . . . [T]he devil . . . is in the details. If you read the agreement, you’ll see that it restricts each public library to exactly one Google terminal. Tens of millions of books online—but at any given moment, no more than 16,543 people are allowed to read them without paying. (That’s how many public libraries and branches there are in the United States, according to the American Library Association—one for every 18,500 Americans.) So, America’s librarians will be hearing these words for generations to come: “Excuse me, where is the Google Terminal?”  Or perhaps the librarians will receive phone calls asking: “Hi, how long is the line for the Google Terminal?” Much more…

Read the full article →

Exploring Google Book Search

August 1, 2008

In November 2005 I wrote an article about Google Book Search and the legal efforts of copyright owners to stop Google from achieving its goal of digitizing the world’s books and making them searchable on Google. The lawsuit filed by the Author’s Guild described there has dragged on with little visible activity and no apparent end in sight, but in the meantime Google has been digitizing books like nobody’s business. Although Google won’t disclose how many books it has scanned (why is this a secret? certainly not because of the lawsuit – the answer would easily be discoverable), word on the street is that as of a year ago Google had scanned a million books. If true, and if they are going full steam, they may be approaching a million and a half by now. Probably more than both you and I could read in a lifetime. Searching and browsing this collection is awkward, but interesting to a book lover. While Google only displays “snippets” of copyrighted works, there is a vast collection of books whose copyright has expired. Presumably, these unprotected works are constantly expanding in number, as copyrights expire with the passage of time. Absent some truly extraordinary action by Congress, which can’t be ruled out entirely, it’s only a matter of time before every book is free of copyright rights. Google displays uncopyrighted books in “full view.”…

Read the full article →