10 ms·

What Ever Happened to Google Books?

303 points by jeo1234 11y ago

giancarlostoro 11y ago
If they somehow could turn those books accessible by a "Google All Book Access" type of service, that would in turn enhance your searching to include all their scanned books it would be amazing. They would however have to somehow figure out how to even make such a service affordable while still keeping publishers 'happy'.
- Synaesthesia 11y ago
  I think the what's missing from this article is the intransigence of publishers to give up anything, and the politicians will usually side with them too with copyright law. There's a world of information out there which could benefit mankind but it's all locked up for profit.
  - KayEss 11y ago
    Which might not be so bad if the copyright owners were actually profiting from it, but for the most part we're talking about books that are out of print and not earning their copyright owners anything -- it's just sheer intransigence.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      And many cases where the copyright holder no longer even exists or can be found.
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    Problem is, many rightsholders either no longer exist (orphaned works), or refuse to profit (keeping books out of further print). What we really need in the US is a copyright system that is "use it or lose it". For a mass produced work such as books, music, or 2D art (anything that is not strictly a limited edition run, or a one off, really), if you refuse to sell it to someone who wishes to buy it, you lose the copyright. A lot of things pirated are pirated simply because people cannot legitimately buy them. The reason Popcorn Time works so well? Because rightsholders refuse to do business with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Rightsholders do not have the right to make that choice in today's America, and need to be forced to understand that they must make the sale if someone offers them an acceptable amount of money. Before computers and the Internet, yes, they had a right to say no, since publishing books and tapes/CDs and whatever cost money... now with the advent of modern technology, publishing works electronically now has a cost that is not relevant to this discussion. Literally, they are throwing money away by telling people no, and that actually MIGHT be illegal depending on how you interpret US law (given how most of these companies are publicly held).
quink 11y ago
Somewhat related: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi... > Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950. Additionally, The Walt Disney Company is sure to get legislation passed before 2024 to extend copyright once more.
marincounty 11y ago
"If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people’s work." I think Google might win over some critics if they resumed the project; set it up as a non-profit, but not some slick non-profit that really doesn't help anyone other than Google? The bylaws would be lawyer proof, and BOD proof. The out of print(out of copyright) books would be available to anyone for free. I was very excited about this project, and it did seem to just die? I used to like and defend Google. As of the last few years, with the tracking, plethora of Ads, and the way they ruined YouTube, at least for me.(Yea, I didn't like the way they took it over. I don't like all the advertisements. Plus, I still have embarrassing videos up there that I literally can't get off. Some kind of password screwup that is beyond the helpful customers at the "Help Boards". See Google employees can't be bothered with trivial stuff like my videos. (I asked, and was told to figure it out.) So Google, if you are listening, go back to your roots. Some people, including myself, hold no loyality to your company anymore. My sister uses Bing. I used to tell her, you might like Google better. Those days are long gone. I'd tell her about Duckduckgo, but it's just not quite their yet.
- benbristow 11y ago
  > I don't like all the advertisements. Google's an advertising company. Of course they were going to add adverts. Even if the original founders still ran the site it'd probably eventually have gotten adverts. Bandwidth isn't free, especially at that scale. You expect Google to run it out of the love of their hearts after paying a huge sum to buy it? If you don't like the adverts, just use Adblock Plus/uBlock Origin and call it a day.
  - LeoNatan25 11y ago
    The tone you have taken to answer, together with the last comment, make no sense together. So you support the ad model, including the silly "out of the love of their hearts" rhetoric, but conclude with installing an ad blocker.
chippy 11y ago
The reminds me of people's attitudes towards reCAPTCHA - started by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. "Stop spam, read books." Everyone was supportive of it when it was used towards the non profit digitization of out of copyright books. So, started externally, Google ran with it and continued and expanded the range of books. It remained good. Apparently loads of books were digitized. Then, possibly along with the change in this article - or along with the perceptible change within Google where everything had to be business accountable a few years back, reCAPTCHA started being used to digitize address numbers from StreetView to improve Googles online mapping, geocoding offering. Nothing to do with books, nothing to do with improving the world. Now reCAPTCHA is being used for image recognition and training (identify the images with salads). Nothing to do with books, information or improving the world - everything to do with Googles own offerings. What's even sadder is that http://captcha.net/ http://captcha.net/ still states that it is being used to "help digitize books" but all the links go to https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html which have all but removed any public benefit wording. " "Stop spam, read books." was removed from Googles site in 2014.
- blfr 11y ago
  How is reliable Google Maps and Street View not improving the world? I'm using them daily and they're improving my life a lot.
  - tdkl 11y ago
    At what cost?
    - golergka 11y ago
      At cost of solving the captcha problem?
  - blub 11y ago
    They are improving your life in exchange for information about you and the places you visit. Their product is closed, the proprietary data is not accessible outside their apps, or if they wish to license it. OpenStreetMap is improving the world.
wyclif 11y ago
I was an early and enthusiastic fan of Google Books. I often do research that relies heavily on 17th-19th century English academic works, which is right in the Google Books public domain sweet spot. But something went awry—I'm not sure what—and the project was allowed to languish by Google. The interface has been in maintenance mode for ages, with no development going on. This leads to a lot of frustration: for instance, you cannot share all of your saved and tagged books with another user, and sharing a shelf or series of shelves is awkward and clunky. In terms of UX, it appears to be abandonware. On top of that, there's no way to know what's going on or who to talk to, because users can't actually contact anyone at Google Books.
- a3_nm 11y ago
  A related complaint is that, even for public domain books, downloading them is painful: sometimes you need to fill a CAPTCHA, recently you often have to create a Google Account just to download a free book <http://uzy.me/qc> http://uzy.me/qc>, and hunt for download options (the system tries to make you read the book within Google Play instead). At some point, also, the books' first page included boilerplate with requests for attribution and non-commercial use (which I think is bogus for public domain material, even if Google digitized it). If Google Books really were about improving public access to books, downloading public domain books would be frictionless, and bulk downloading and mirroring would be encouraged.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Google-scanned books are also available as a direct URL on the Internet Archive, there's no need to use Google's multi-step access interface.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    I could download the one you linked without an account easily – Gear-menu, "Download EPUB", done. But you are right, often they are horrible to access.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  What went awry is what's described in the article -- the rights holders killed the possibility of fulfilling the goals of the grand idea with lawsuits. I wouldn't be eager to continue on with a project after getting that reception either.
hanlec 11y ago
> I have a simpler suggestion, nicknamed the Big Bang license. Congress should allow anyone with a scanned library to pay some price—say, a hundred and twenty-five million dollars—to gain a license, subject to any opt-outs, allowing them to make those scanned prints available to institutional or individual subscribers. Wouldn't this be great? Many of these materials are not indexed and chances to discover them are decreasing every day. Second, getting access to these materials is for many almost impossible (out of print, not available in the libraries, etc.)
espes 11y ago
Shout out to the Internet Archive, a non-profit close to what the author describes. Unfortunately it turns out book scanning is expensive and rights-holders still don't like it. https://archive.org/details/texts&tab=about https://archive.org/details/texts&tab=about
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Much of the IA's corpus has come through Google from my own observations. And their BookReader application is really amazing.
- yonran 11y ago
  Note that the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle was one of the strongest critics of the creative class-action settlement which would have allowed Google as a one-off to publish the out-of-print orphan works that it scanned. If the lawsuit had gone to trial and Google prevailed on fair-use, it would have set a precedent that would benefit the Internet Archive. But the Internet Archive was vehemently opposed to any settlement that didn’t help them. Reference: Brewster’s op-ed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR2009051802637.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05... and filings by Internet Archive and Open Book Alliance https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2005cv08136/273913 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2005cv08...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ching_wow_ka 11y ago
I can say pretty certainly that all the text they've gathered through the Google Books project is in use in their language models and other AI models for their search engine, speech recognition, etc. They got what they wanted. I can't see what incentive they have as a business to grant access to the books that justifies paying employees for it.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Gather data on search queries and highlighted phrases for books? There is value in knowing which subset of the corpus is more valuable. Apple acquired a "Pandora for Books" recommendation startup which had permission from publishers, who provided text for indexing, http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 . Their machine classification made it possible to search books for topics whose words were not present in the book.
- kylebgorman 11y ago
  Just my personal opinion, but when you have an indexed copy of the whole web, a few million OCRed-but-not-corrected books from previous centuries added to your LM are not going to improve 2015 speech recognition quality.
  - oneJob 11y ago
    It would illustrate how language and ideas evolve over time. It would illustrate how language and ideas that are from different geographical sources might differ or be similar, especially during pre-Internet periods. It would provide source the material which is being referenced in contemporary works. It would provide many, many other benefits.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ching_wow_ka 11y ago
    How many words do you think the entire web, as crawled by Google, has?
walterbell 11y ago
In June 2015, the US Copyright Office issued their report with draft legislation, "Orphan Works and Mass Digitization", after consultation with creators, libraries and tech companies. This guidance can be used by the US Congress to create laws permitting Google Books and other efforts to digitize orphaned works. http://copyright.gov/orphan/ http://copyright.gov/orphan/
- walterbell 11y ago
  Here is a legal analysis of the Copyright Office's proposal to limit damages for orphan works, in the context of TPP requirements for damages, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/09/03/in-a-dark-corner-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership-lurks-some-pretty-nasty-copyright-law/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... "How is this scheme, which provides for no damages (in some circumstances at least), compliant with the TPP requirement that the US must provide for either “pre-established damages,” or “additional damages”? No damages = no damages, no? A court would (as I read the new statute) NOT be permitted to award punitive, or exemplary, damages in orphan works cases – but the TPP seems to require that."
yannis 11y ago
>The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public. I had the same excitement as the author when Google Books came out. The service has stagnated over the years. Reading snippets is such a frustrating experience (you cannot even cut and paste the text). Even the books where one can buy an ebook is not available for some countries. Many times it is quicker to search on archive.org to find related books digitized by Microsoft. We still have a long way to go where knowledge can be distributed at low cost and in abundance ...
- kuschku 11y ago
  The guttenberg project has a lot of ebooks available for free, but only for public-domain books.
  - fernly 11y ago
    Indeed Project Gutenberg[1] has for a number of years been putting out-of-copyright books online. They take great pains[2] to make sure the books are no longer in copyright. Another very important difference is that PG books are proofread by human beings and have a much, much lower rate of OCR errors than the bulk-scanned Google books which are, often, abysmally, disgustingly full of blatant scan errors, sometimes to the point of being unreadable. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
oneJob 11y ago
Attempting to force Google to change course on this would at best result in an empty gesture on Google's part with likely no follow up regarding the bigger project. They may open up what is already scanned, but they're not likely to resume the project under benevolent terms. Employment used to last as lifetime. One could retire from Sears with decent benefits if they were loyal. Today, many of us are contract employees or Uber style "partners". This is the same phenomenon we see happening here, just on the product side. We've been going down this road for a while now. You often don't buy products that last a lifetime anymore. It's often necessary to buy a whole new one rather than fix the one you already have because the replacement parts aren't made available. So, it's happened to our workforce and our products, now it is also happening to our companies. Always in the name of profit. Fair weather friends. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it is bad. Almost always it is a false choice. The logic of capitalism insists on competition and specialization which are often at odds with cooperation and leisure. Why should Google need to choose between the bottom line and benefiting its community by sharing the work they've already accomplished. In a word, competition. To me, this is the greatest strength of open-source. It allows for cooperation and facilitates transparency, the very foundations of community. Open-source has done nothing to stymie specialization, one of the main thrusts of "The Wealth of Nations". The other, self interest serving the whole, I think, has been shown by history and OSS to be one possible, but not the sole, idea regarding what motivations might facilitate a productive community. So, back to Google Books. What happened to Google Books is exactly what one should expect to have happened in a political-economy such as ours. A different outcome would not necessarily have resulted from different decisions by Google, but by different incentives and structures of a different economic framework. Let's not be distracted by the red herring of this anecdote, framing it as a one off, but instead look to this anecdote as a case study in a much larger domain.
analognoise 11y ago
Somebody could always start a non-profit and continue the work - we don't have to leave it to Google and stay disappointed.
- chrisbennet 11y ago
  The rights holders that sued Google would probably sue a non-profit as well.
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    They did sue the non-profit HathiTrust (a coalition started by the U of Michigan) -- HathiTrust won, after many years. Now, HathiTrust was not generally making _full text_ of in-copyright works available, but only search results. HathiTrust doesn't even provide snippets of your search results, just page numbers, unfortunately -- mostly out of fear of lawsuits. But HathiTrust's court victory helped establish at least some fair use rights for scanning of books -- more than Google itself did, or was interested in -- if the settlement had been accepted, no legal rights would have been established for anyone, only Google would have had permission from the Author's Guild, endorsed by a court to give them -- but nobody else-- freedom from lawsuits from anyone else too.
    - magicalist 11y ago
      > But HathiTrust's court victory helped establish at least some fair use rights for scanning of books -- more than Google itself did er... https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fair-use-proceedings https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fai...
joesmo 11y ago
So these books that the fight has been about are out of print and essentially do not exist anymore. They do not make money for anyone. They do not contribute to anyone or anything. For all intents and purposes, they might as well not have existed at all. Google tries to make a library of these nonexistent works so that they can once again benefit humanity and the copyright holders (which is pretty much never the authors when it comes to books) are upset because they're losing out on their $0 of profit. Yeah, copyright law really works well in this country.
njharman 11y ago
> split fifty-fifty between authors an publishers Why? If anything it should be split between copyright holders. Whoever they are. Legally, author / publisher, are meaningless. But really if we can't get it together as a culture to eliminate perpetual copyright we should at least make a rule that if a work is not available (print or online) for 5 years then it is deemed abandoned and no longer under copyright. Available doesn't mean free. Our cultural heritage is a shared resource. It is not right for it to be locked away.
jrochkind1 11y ago
This article leaves out some important things. Google making the project non-profit would not have saved them from the lawsuit. The Author's Guild, separately, sued a non-profit partner in the Google Books scanning project -- HathiTrust. [1] That lawsuit was not resolved until 2012 -- when, without a settlement, HathiTrust won on fair use. The court decided that scanning books for searching was fair use. While the court did not say the same for displaying full text -- what the OP wants -- it is notable that the court's opinion was not primarily based on non-profit status of the organization (as is common in U.S. fair use case law; the non-profit factor has generally dwindled in court decision-making), but on transformativeness. The OP mentions "Others argued that the settlement could create a monopoly in online, out-of-print books," but gives that opinion rather short shrift. This was a very real concern -- what if Google's use really would be fair use? If the court decided that, the opinion would apply as precedent to everyone. But a settlement really does apply only to Google -- no one else even had access to the terms of the settlement. Anyone else trying to do the same would risk being subject to a decade-long lawsuit of their own. The OP should ask, why didn't Google go to trial? "If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public...." they should have gone to trial to establish the right for all. As HathiTrust did. The Google Books project still exists, they did not take it down because of legal worries, even in the absence of the settlement. But it has indeed been allowed to languish. While I'm sure the multi-year lawsuit contributed to this -- Google starting ambitious projects and then allowing them to languish, without improvement, without fulfilling their original promise, slowly degrading and withering away -- is a pretty common Google practice even without multi-year lawsuits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr...
- magicalist 11y ago
  > Google making the project non-profit would not have saved them from the lawsuit. The Author's Guild, separately, sued a non-profit partner in the Google Books scanning project -- HathiTrust. > That lawsuit was not resolved until 2012 -- when, without a settlement, HathiTrust won on fair use. I think you're mixed up on some things. HathiTrust wasn't sued until after the settlement was rejected, meaning Google was getting sued simultaneously. It is good the original settlement was rejected, though I agree with the author that a modification to the settlement, similar to what the Internet Archive was asking for, was a much better solution than another decade of court battles and no orphan works for another century. > The OP should ask, why didn't Google go to trial? Google did go and the district court ruled that scanning, searching and snippets were fair use in 2013[1]. The case is still ongoing, the Second Circuit heard arguments last December[2] [1] https://www.publicknowledge.org/files/google%20summary%20judgment%20final.pdf https://www.publicknowledge.org/files/google%20summary%20jud... [2] https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fair-use-proceedings https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fai...
tuxt 11y ago
>But, of course, leaving things to Congress has become a synonym for doing nothing, and, predictably, a full seven years after the court decision was first announced, we’re still waiting. Ha, never thought about that 7 years ago. :)
Tegaves1969 11y ago
I've made $96,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do...www.Buzz34.Com
jay_kyburz 11y ago
The authors Big Bang licence is a bit crazy. Why not just monetise Books in exactly the same way they monetise Video in YouTube? Surely the copyright law is quite similar.
- o_nate 11y ago
  The law is probably similar, but the technological ability to restrict access is not. Youtube allows you to stream only, not download. That makes it easier to get license holders on board. (Yes, there are workarounds for that, but most users won't bother to go to the trouble, and the quality of the download would be degraded from a purchased copy.) With books, there's no easy way to limit access like that while providing a usable service.
pervycreeper 11y ago
My biggest pet peeve with Google Books is that too many books which are presumably in the public domain have access to them restricted. Not sure if this is oversight, or on purpose.
wedesoft 11y ago
Reducing the copyright term to something more reasonable would help a lot, too.

303 points by jeo1234 11y ago

If they somehow could turn those books accessible by a "Google All Book Access" type of service, that would in turn enhance your searching to include all their scanned books it would be amazing. They would however have to somehow figure out how to even make such a service affordable while still keeping publishers 'happy'.

Synaesthesia 11y ago
I think the what's missing from this article is the intransigence of publishers to give up anything, and the politicians will usually side with them too with copyright law. There's a world of information out there which could benefit mankind but it's all locked up for profit.
- KayEss 11y ago
  Which might not be so bad if the copyright owners were actually profiting from it, but for the most part we're talking about books that are out of print and not earning their copyright owners anything -- it's just sheer intransigence.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    And many cases where the copyright holder no longer even exists or can be found.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  Problem is, many rightsholders either no longer exist (orphaned works), or refuse to profit (keeping books out of further print). What we really need in the US is a copyright system that is "use it or lose it". For a mass produced work such as books, music, or 2D art (anything that is not strictly a limited edition run, or a one off, really), if you refuse to sell it to someone who wishes to buy it, you lose the copyright. A lot of things pirated are pirated simply because people cannot legitimately buy them. The reason Popcorn Time works so well? Because rightsholders refuse to do business with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Rightsholders do not have the right to make that choice in today's America, and need to be forced to understand that they must make the sale if someone offers them an acceptable amount of money. Before computers and the Internet, yes, they had a right to say no, since publishing books and tapes/CDs and whatever cost money... now with the advent of modern technology, publishing works electronically now has a cost that is not relevant to this discussion. Literally, they are throwing money away by telling people no, and that actually MIGHT be illegal depending on how you interpret US law (given how most of these companies are publicly held).

quink 11y ago

Somewhat related: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi... > Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950. Additionally, The Walt Disney Company is sure to get legislation passed before 2024 to extend copyright once more.

marincounty 11y ago

"If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people’s work." I think Google might win over some critics if they resumed the project; set it up as a non-profit, but not some slick non-profit that really doesn't help anyone other than Google? The bylaws would be lawyer proof, and BOD proof. The out of print(out of copyright) books would be available to anyone for free. I was very excited about this project, and it did seem to just die? I used to like and defend Google. As of the last few years, with the tracking, plethora of Ads, and the way they ruined YouTube, at least for me.(Yea, I didn't like the way they took it over. I don't like all the advertisements. Plus, I still have embarrassing videos up there that I literally can't get off. Some kind of password screwup that is beyond the helpful customers at the "Help Boards". See Google employees can't be bothered with trivial stuff like my videos. (I asked, and was told to figure it out.) So Google, if you are listening, go back to your roots. Some people, including myself, hold no loyality to your company anymore. My sister uses Bing. I used to tell her, you might like Google better. Those days are long gone. I'd tell her about Duckduckgo, but it's just not quite their yet.

benbristow 11y ago
> I don't like all the advertisements. Google's an advertising company. Of course they were going to add adverts. Even if the original founders still ran the site it'd probably eventually have gotten adverts. Bandwidth isn't free, especially at that scale. You expect Google to run it out of the love of their hearts after paying a huge sum to buy it? If you don't like the adverts, just use Adblock Plus/uBlock Origin and call it a day.
- LeoNatan25 11y ago
  The tone you have taken to answer, together with the last comment, make no sense together. So you support the ad model, including the silly "out of the love of their hearts" rhetoric, but conclude with installing an ad blocker.

chippy 11y ago

The reminds me of people's attitudes towards reCAPTCHA - started by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. "Stop spam, read books." Everyone was supportive of it when it was used towards the non profit digitization of out of copyright books. So, started externally, Google ran with it and continued and expanded the range of books. It remained good. Apparently loads of books were digitized. Then, possibly along with the change in this article - or along with the perceptible change within Google where everything had to be business accountable a few years back, reCAPTCHA started being used to digitize address numbers from StreetView to improve Googles online mapping, geocoding offering. Nothing to do with books, nothing to do with improving the world. Now reCAPTCHA is being used for image recognition and training (identify the images with salads). Nothing to do with books, information or improving the world - everything to do with Googles own offerings. What's even sadder is that http://captcha.net/ http://captcha.net/ still states that it is being used to "help digitize books" but all the links go to https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html which have all but removed any public benefit wording. " "Stop spam, read books." was removed from Googles site in 2014.

blfr 11y ago
How is reliable Google Maps and Street View not improving the world? I'm using them daily and they're improving my life a lot.
- tdkl 11y ago
  At what cost?
  - golergka 11y ago
    At cost of solving the captcha problem?
- blub 11y ago
  They are improving your life in exchange for information about you and the places you visit. Their product is closed, the proprietary data is not accessible outside their apps, or if they wish to license it. OpenStreetMap is improving the world.

wyclif 11y ago

I was an early and enthusiastic fan of Google Books. I often do research that relies heavily on 17th-19th century English academic works, which is right in the Google Books public domain sweet spot. But something went awry—I'm not sure what—and the project was allowed to languish by Google. The interface has been in maintenance mode for ages, with no development going on. This leads to a lot of frustration: for instance, you cannot share all of your saved and tagged books with another user, and sharing a shelf or series of shelves is awkward and clunky. In terms of UX, it appears to be abandonware. On top of that, there's no way to know what's going on or who to talk to, because users can't actually contact anyone at Google Books.

a3_nm 11y ago
A related complaint is that, even for public domain books, downloading them is painful: sometimes you need to fill a CAPTCHA, recently you often have to create a Google Account just to download a free book <http://uzy.me/qc> http://uzy.me/qc>, and hunt for download options (the system tries to make you read the book within Google Play instead). At some point, also, the books' first page included boilerplate with requests for attribution and non-commercial use (which I think is bogus for public domain material, even if Google digitized it). If Google Books really were about improving public access to books, downloading public domain books would be frictionless, and bulk downloading and mirroring would be encouraged.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Google-scanned books are also available as a direct URL on the Internet Archive, there's no need to use Google's multi-step access interface.
- kuschku 11y ago
  I could download the one you linked without an account easily – Gear-menu, "Download EPUB", done. But you are right, often they are horrible to access.
CydeWeys 11y ago
What went awry is what's described in the article -- the rights holders killed the possibility of fulfilling the goals of the grand idea with lawsuits. I wouldn't be eager to continue on with a project after getting that reception either.

hanlec 11y ago

> I have a simpler suggestion, nicknamed the Big Bang license. Congress should allow anyone with a scanned library to pay some price—say, a hundred and twenty-five million dollars—to gain a license, subject to any opt-outs, allowing them to make those scanned prints available to institutional or individual subscribers. Wouldn't this be great? Many of these materials are not indexed and chances to discover them are decreasing every day. Second, getting access to these materials is for many almost impossible (out of print, not available in the libraries, etc.)

espes 11y ago

Shout out to the Internet Archive, a non-profit close to what the author describes. Unfortunately it turns out book scanning is expensive and rights-holders still don't like it. https://archive.org/details/texts&tab=about https://archive.org/details/texts&tab=about

dredmorbius 11y ago
Much of the IA's corpus has come through Google from my own observations. And their BookReader application is really amazing.
yonran 11y ago
Note that the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle was one of the strongest critics of the creative class-action settlement which would have allowed Google as a one-off to publish the out-of-print orphan works that it scanned. If the lawsuit had gone to trial and Google prevailed on fair-use, it would have set a precedent that would benefit the Internet Archive. But the Internet Archive was vehemently opposed to any settlement that didn’t help them. Reference: Brewster’s op-ed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR2009051802637.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05... and filings by Internet Archive and Open Book Alliance https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2005cv08136/273913 https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2005cv08...

deleted 11y ago

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ching_wow_ka 11y ago

I can say pretty certainly that all the text they've gathered through the Google Books project is in use in their language models and other AI models for their search engine, speech recognition, etc. They got what they wanted. I can't see what incentive they have as a business to grant access to the books that justifies paying employees for it.

walterbell 11y ago
Gather data on search queries and highlighted phrases for books? There is value in knowing which subset of the corpus is more valuable. Apple acquired a "Pandora for Books" recommendation startup which had permission from publishers, who provided text for indexing, http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-buys-booklamp-2014-7 . Their machine classification made it possible to search books for topics whose words were not present in the book.
kylebgorman 11y ago
Just my personal opinion, but when you have an indexed copy of the whole web, a few million OCRed-but-not-corrected books from previous centuries added to your LM are not going to improve 2015 speech recognition quality.
- oneJob 11y ago
  It would illustrate how language and ideas evolve over time. It would illustrate how language and ideas that are from different geographical sources might differ or be similar, especially during pre-Internet periods. It would provide source the material which is being referenced in contemporary works. It would provide many, many other benefits.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ching_wow_ka 11y ago
  How many words do you think the entire web, as crawled by Google, has?

walterbell 11y ago

In June 2015, the US Copyright Office issued their report with draft legislation, "Orphan Works and Mass Digitization", after consultation with creators, libraries and tech companies. This guidance can be used by the US Congress to create laws permitting Google Books and other efforts to digitize orphaned works. http://copyright.gov/orphan/ http://copyright.gov/orphan/

walterbell 11y ago
Here is a legal analysis of the Copyright Office's proposal to limit damages for orphan works, in the context of TPP requirements for damages, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/09/03/in-a-dark-corner-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership-lurks-some-pretty-nasty-copyright-law/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... "How is this scheme, which provides for no damages (in some circumstances at least), compliant with the TPP requirement that the US must provide for either “pre-established damages,” or “additional damages”? No damages = no damages, no? A court would (as I read the new statute) NOT be permitted to award punitive, or exemplary, damages in orphan works cases – but the TPP seems to require that."

yannis 11y ago

>The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public. I had the same excitement as the author when Google Books came out. The service has stagnated over the years. Reading snippets is such a frustrating experience (you cannot even cut and paste the text). Even the books where one can buy an ebook is not available for some countries. Many times it is quicker to search on archive.org to find related books digitized by Microsoft. We still have a long way to go where knowledge can be distributed at low cost and in abundance ...

kuschku 11y ago
The guttenberg project has a lot of ebooks available for free, but only for public-domain books.
- fernly 11y ago
  Indeed Project Gutenberg[1] has for a number of years been putting out-of-copyright books online. They take great pains[2] to make sure the books are no longer in copyright. Another very important difference is that PG books are proofread by human beings and have a much, much lower rate of OCR errors than the bulk-scanned Google books which are, often, abysmally, disgustingly full of blatant scan errors, sometimes to the point of being unreadable. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To

oneJob 11y ago

Attempting to force Google to change course on this would at best result in an empty gesture on Google's part with likely no follow up regarding the bigger project. They may open up what is already scanned, but they're not likely to resume the project under benevolent terms. Employment used to last as lifetime. One could retire from Sears with decent benefits if they were loyal. Today, many of us are contract employees or Uber style "partners". This is the same phenomenon we see happening here, just on the product side. We've been going down this road for a while now. You often don't buy products that last a lifetime anymore. It's often necessary to buy a whole new one rather than fix the one you already have because the replacement parts aren't made available. So, it's happened to our workforce and our products, now it is also happening to our companies. Always in the name of profit. Fair weather friends. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it is bad. Almost always it is a false choice. The logic of capitalism insists on competition and specialization which are often at odds with cooperation and leisure. Why should Google need to choose between the bottom line and benefiting its community by sharing the work they've already accomplished. In a word, competition. To me, this is the greatest strength of open-source. It allows for cooperation and facilitates transparency, the very foundations of community. Open-source has done nothing to stymie specialization, one of the main thrusts of "The Wealth of Nations". The other, self interest serving the whole, I think, has been shown by history and OSS to be one possible, but not the sole, idea regarding what motivations might facilitate a productive community. So, back to Google Books. What happened to Google Books is exactly what one should expect to have happened in a political-economy such as ours. A different outcome would not necessarily have resulted from different decisions by Google, but by different incentives and structures of a different economic framework. Let's not be distracted by the red herring of this anecdote, framing it as a one off, but instead look to this anecdote as a case study in a much larger domain.

analognoise 11y ago

Somebody could always start a non-profit and continue the work - we don't have to leave it to Google and stay disappointed.

chrisbennet 11y ago
The rights holders that sued Google would probably sue a non-profit as well.
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  They did sue the non-profit HathiTrust (a coalition started by the U of Michigan) -- HathiTrust won, after many years. Now, HathiTrust was not generally making _full text_ of in-copyright works available, but only search results. HathiTrust doesn't even provide snippets of your search results, just page numbers, unfortunately -- mostly out of fear of lawsuits. But HathiTrust's court victory helped establish at least some fair use rights for scanning of books -- more than Google itself did, or was interested in -- if the settlement had been accepted, no legal rights would have been established for anyone, only Google would have had permission from the Author's Guild, endorsed by a court to give them -- but nobody else-- freedom from lawsuits from anyone else too.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    > But HathiTrust's court victory helped establish at least some fair use rights for scanning of books -- more than Google itself did er... https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fair-use-proceedings https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fai...

joesmo 11y ago

So these books that the fight has been about are out of print and essentially do not exist anymore. They do not make money for anyone. They do not contribute to anyone or anything. For all intents and purposes, they might as well not have existed at all. Google tries to make a library of these nonexistent works so that they can once again benefit humanity and the copyright holders (which is pretty much never the authors when it comes to books) are upset because they're losing out on their $0 of profit. Yeah, copyright law really works well in this country.

njharman 11y ago

> split fifty-fifty between authors an publishers Why? If anything it should be split between copyright holders. Whoever they are. Legally, author / publisher, are meaningless. But really if we can't get it together as a culture to eliminate perpetual copyright we should at least make a rule that if a work is not available (print or online) for 5 years then it is deemed abandoned and no longer under copyright. Available doesn't mean free. Our cultural heritage is a shared resource. It is not right for it to be locked away.

jrochkind1 11y ago

This article leaves out some important things. Google making the project non-profit would not have saved them from the lawsuit. The Author's Guild, separately, sued a non-profit partner in the Google Books scanning project -- HathiTrust. [1] That lawsuit was not resolved until 2012 -- when, without a settlement, HathiTrust won on fair use. The court decided that scanning books for searching was fair use. While the court did not say the same for displaying full text -- what the OP wants -- it is notable that the court's opinion was not primarily based on non-profit status of the organization (as is common in U.S. fair use case law; the non-profit factor has generally dwindled in court decision-making), but on transformativeness. The OP mentions "Others argued that the settlement could create a monopoly in online, out-of-print books," but gives that opinion rather short shrift. This was a very real concern -- what if Google's use really would be fair use? If the court decided that, the opinion would apply as precedent to everyone. But a settlement really does apply only to Google -- no one else even had access to the terms of the settlement. Anyone else trying to do the same would risk being subject to a decade-long lawsuit of their own. The OP should ask, why didn't Google go to trial? "If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public...." they should have gone to trial to establish the right for all. As HathiTrust did. The Google Books project still exists, they did not take it down because of legal worries, even in the absence of the settlement. But it has indeed been allowed to languish. While I'm sure the multi-year lawsuit contributed to this -- Google starting ambitious projects and then allowing them to languish, without improvement, without fulfilling their original promise, slowly degrading and withering away -- is a pretty common Google practice even without multi-year lawsuits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr...

magicalist 11y ago
> Google making the project non-profit would not have saved them from the lawsuit. The Author's Guild, separately, sued a non-profit partner in the Google Books scanning project -- HathiTrust. > That lawsuit was not resolved until 2012 -- when, without a settlement, HathiTrust won on fair use. I think you're mixed up on some things. HathiTrust wasn't sued until after the settlement was rejected, meaning Google was getting sued simultaneously. It is good the original settlement was rejected, though I agree with the author that a modification to the settlement, similar to what the Internet Archive was asking for, was a much better solution than another decade of court battles and no orphan works for another century. > The OP should ask, why didn't Google go to trial? Google did go and the district court ruled that scanning, searching and snippets were fair use in 2013[1]. The case is still ongoing, the Second Circuit heard arguments last December[2] [1] https://www.publicknowledge.org/files/google%20summary%20judgment%20final.pdf https://www.publicknowledge.org/files/google%20summary%20jud... [2] https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fair-use-proceedings https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fai...

tuxt 11y ago

>But, of course, leaving things to Congress has become a synonym for doing nothing, and, predictably, a full seven years after the court decision was first announced, we’re still waiting. Ha, never thought about that 7 years ago. :)

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jay_kyburz 11y ago

The authors Big Bang licence is a bit crazy. Why not just monetise Books in exactly the same way they monetise Video in YouTube? Surely the copyright law is quite similar.

o_nate 11y ago
The law is probably similar, but the technological ability to restrict access is not. Youtube allows you to stream only, not download. That makes it easier to get license holders on board. (Yes, there are workarounds for that, but most users won't bother to go to the trouble, and the quality of the download would be degraded from a purchased copy.) With books, there's no easy way to limit access like that while providing a usable service.

pervycreeper 11y ago

My biggest pet peeve with Google Books is that too many books which are presumably in the public domain have access to them restricted. Not sure if this is oversight, or on purpose.

wedesoft 11y ago

Reducing the copyright term to something more reasonable would help a lot, too.