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Google tried to make this work, but they were sued; and then they made a deal, and then many, many people objected to the resulting deal. This is the usual proc

by ppod 8y ago

Google tried to make this work, but they were sued; and then they made a deal, and then many, many people objected to the resulting deal. This is the usual process whereby a corporation is first criticised for having too much power, and then when they relinquish power they are criticised for not doing enough. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t... The end of that article is a not-so-subtle plea for someone within google to perhaps accidentally anonymously place this material in public.

mimixco 8y ago
Exactly my point. The "deal" resulted in anyone being able to download the full books if they go to a university library which is a partner of Hathi Trust. Of course, after that download, you have the full PDF and you can do whatever you want! This isn't protection for copyright holders. (Hathi Trust got its books from Google Books scans and doesn't pay copyright holders.) This "deal" isn't helping anyone and it hurts researchers.
- ahi 8y ago
  HathiTrust does not provide access to in copyright materials to anyone. They provide research access for "non-consumptive" use through the HathiTrust Research Center.
  - mimixco 8y ago
    That's not correct. First of all, all books are copyright by their authors. Anyone can go to a partner library (there's a list on the login page of the Hathi site) and download those books as PDFs. Try it! I've done it many times.
    - ahi 8y ago
      These pages provide a decent overview of access restrictions for HathiTrust materials: https://www.hathitrust.org/features_benefits https://www.hathitrust.org/features_benefits https://www.hathitrust.org/out-of-print-brittle https://www.hathitrust.org/out-of-print-brittle
greglindahl 8y ago
The "deal" (which failed, btw) was a crappy one. The only solution is legislation, not a "deal" made with the Author's Guild that would give Google and only Google special status.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
zeveb 8y ago
It's fascinating to read that article: > Page wanted to know how long it would take to scan more than a hundred-million books, so he started with one that was lying around. Using the metronome to keep a steady pace, he and Mayer paged through the book cover-to-cover. It took them 40 minutes. > Michigan told Page that at the current pace, digitizing their entire collection—7 million volumes—was going to take about a thousand years. Page, who’d by now given the problem some thought, replied that he thought Google could do it in six. > In just over a decade, after making deals with Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library, and dozens of other library systems, the company, outpacing Page’s prediction, had scanned about 25 million books. It cost them an estimated $400 million. It was a feat not just of technology but of logistics. > At its peak, the project involved about 50 full-time software engineers. They developed optical character-recognition software for turning raw images into text; they wrote de-warping and color-correction and contrast-adjustment routines to make the images easier to process; they developed algorithms to detect illustrations and diagrams in books, to extract page numbers, to turn footnotes into real citations, and, per Brin and Page’s early research, to rank books by relevance. Doesn't that take you back to an optimistic time when Google was exciting, and we thought that it could do amazing amounts of good for the world? I miss that era.
- icelancer 8y ago
  Yeah, it does. It's also not wholly Google's fault, obviously, since ppod clearly illustrated why. No good deed goes unsued.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  I worked for the Harvard library for a while (as a part time student job) examining the quality of a lot of these Google scans in ~2005. I’m frankly not very impressed by Google’s scanning process, OCR, image detection, de-warping, contrast adjustment, general QA/QC, etc. Quality is variable, peak quality is mediocre, and the results are largely useless for anything but text. Like a lot of other parts of Google, it’s a case where they tried to cheap out on trained human labor, and make it up with algorithms. On the upside, even a mediocre book scan is better than nothing.

by ppod 8y ago

mimixco 8y ago

Exactly my point. The "deal" resulted in anyone being able to download the full books if they go to a university library which is a partner of Hathi Trust. Of course, after that download, you have the full PDF and you can do whatever you want! This isn't protection for copyright holders. (Hathi Trust got its books from Google Books scans and doesn't pay copyright holders.) This "deal" isn't helping anyone and it hurts researchers.

ahi 8y ago
HathiTrust does not provide access to in copyright materials to anyone. They provide research access for "non-consumptive" use through the HathiTrust Research Center.
- mimixco 8y ago
  That's not correct. First of all, all books are copyright by their authors. Anyone can go to a partner library (there's a list on the login page of the Hathi site) and download those books as PDFs. Try it! I've done it many times.
  - ahi 8y ago
    These pages provide a decent overview of access restrictions for HathiTrust materials: https://www.hathitrust.org/features_benefits https://www.hathitrust.org/features_benefits https://www.hathitrust.org/out-of-print-brittle https://www.hathitrust.org/out-of-print-brittle

greglindahl 8y ago

The "deal" (which failed, btw) was a crappy one. The only solution is legislation, not a "deal" made with the Author's Guild that would give Google and only Google special status.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

zeveb 8y ago

It's fascinating to read that article: > Page wanted to know how long it would take to scan more than a hundred-million books, so he started with one that was lying around. Using the metronome to keep a steady pace, he and Mayer paged through the book cover-to-cover. It took them 40 minutes. > Michigan told Page that at the current pace, digitizing their entire collection—7 million volumes—was going to take about a thousand years. Page, who’d by now given the problem some thought, replied that he thought Google could do it in six. > In just over a decade, after making deals with Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library, and dozens of other library systems, the company, outpacing Page’s prediction, had scanned about 25 million books. It cost them an estimated $400 million. It was a feat not just of technology but of logistics. > At its peak, the project involved about 50 full-time software engineers. They developed optical character-recognition software for turning raw images into text; they wrote de-warping and color-correction and contrast-adjustment routines to make the images easier to process; they developed algorithms to detect illustrations and diagrams in books, to extract page numbers, to turn footnotes into real citations, and, per Brin and Page’s early research, to rank books by relevance. Doesn't that take you back to an optimistic time when Google was exciting, and we thought that it could do amazing amounts of good for the world? I miss that era.

icelancer 8y ago
Yeah, it does. It's also not wholly Google's fault, obviously, since ppod clearly illustrated why. No good deed goes unsued.
jacobolus 8y ago
I worked for the Harvard library for a while (as a part time student job) examining the quality of a lot of these Google scans in ~2005. I’m frankly not very impressed by Google’s scanning process, OCR, image detection, de-warping, contrast adjustment, general QA/QC, etc. Quality is variable, peak quality is mediocre, and the results are largely useless for anything but text. Like a lot of other parts of Google, it’s a case where they tried to cheap out on trained human labor, and make it up with algorithms. On the upside, even a mediocre book scan is better than nothing.