15 ms·

Better World Books and the Internet Archive Unite to Preserve Millions of Books

389 points by l1n 7y ago

classified 7y ago
Any alternative to Google's land grab of intellectual rights to the books they digitize (in a horrible quality to boot) can only be a good thing.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Doesn't Google Books push a lot of their PD content to the Internet Archive themselves? That doesn't seem like an undue "land grab", it seems like they're being good net citizens for once.
mindcrime 7y ago
Hmm... so, at first blush at least, this sounds like a pretty Big Deal, and a Good Thing. From the press release: Better World Books, the world’s leading socially conscious online bookseller, is now owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, not-for-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner the Internet Archive. This groundbreaking partnership will allow both organizations to pursue their collective mission of making knowledge universally accessible to readers everywhere. This new relationship will provide additional resources and newfound synergies backed by a shared enthusiasm for advancing global literacy. Together, the two organizations are expanding the digital frontier of book preservation to ensure books are accessible to all for generations to come. This new relationship will allow Better World Books to provide a steady stream of books to be digitized by the Internet Archive, thereby growing its digital holdings to millions of books. Libraries that work alongside Better World Books will now make a bigger impact than ever. Any book that does not yet exist in digital form will go into a pipeline for future digitization, preservation and access. Sounds good to me. Of course, there's a big difference between issuing a press release and actually doing something. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in reality.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Better World Books has in my experience been purposefully misleading about the structure and purpose of their business. They put book donation boxes everywhere that are covered in "save the children" style graphics and messages. But the reality is, they are a for profit company that very much enriched the owners while donating a very small percentage to charity. And it's one thing to have a corporation that does social good. But their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity. They also make deals with public libraries to sell their books online and take a big cut. Which makes me suspicious of this new arrangement. So it is now a for profit corporation owned by a non-profit? Did the owners decide to reorganize or donate the whole business or something?
  - ryana 7y ago
    As a prior BWB employee (with no equity or outcome from this sale) I'm happy to respond to some of these concerns. "Very much enriched the owners" is quite a stretch. Especially considering pretty much every equity holder was wiped out ~5 years ago when they had to raise money to stay in business. The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco. Before that he lived in a townhome in suburban Atlanta. This business is not and never has thrown off cash. At best they've made as much money in profit as they've donated, in cash, to literacy causes over the life of the business. A "very small percentage" donated to charity is up for debate based on everyone's belief of what that means, but all charity payments were made as a percentage of net sales revenue, which was essentially the money that came in from any sale. The only cost that was subtracted out was marketplace fees when selling on Amazon, ebay, etc. Sales percentage back to the book sources (academic and public libraries) and non-profit partners (on all sales from all sources) were paid out before shipping costs were even accounted for. "Their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity" is not true. Drop box books accounted for < 10% of all books sourced and even less than that of revenue since those books are typically the lowest quality stream (slightly better title mix than thrift purchases, but much higher logistics cost and risk of spoilage). The business is almost entirely dependent on public and academic library partnerships. There were many, MANY monthly all hands meetings we sat in where the business lost money but wrote 6 or 7 figure checks to literacy partners. Donations were not a function of making money. BWB was a great company full of people who truly cared about the mission. Some people did well, but nobody got rich off this business. If they didn't move most of the corporate activity out of Atlanta and up to Indiana I would still have been happy to keep working there.
dublinben 7y ago
Original source on the Internet Archive blog: https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy-better-world-books-and-the-internet-archive-unite-to-preserve-millions-of-books/ https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy...
macawfish 7y ago
These days, my mind immediately jumps to "what if you plugged all those books into GPT-2!?"
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mekarpeles 7y ago
  mek here from Internet Archive's openlibrary.org project. We've been in broad talks w/ folks like OpenAI about how the contents of texts may be used to power better discovery and to increase usefulness of books. Open Library is pretty far from GPT-2, but we do have fulltext search across ~3.5M books: http://openlibrary.org/search/inside http://openlibrary.org/search/inside We're also an open source project [https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary] and happy to collaborate w/ folks on such projects. I'm personally very inspired by the https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-booklamp/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-booklamp/ Booklamp project; building a genome for every book and surfacing as much content as we can to help patrons discover citations, quotes, and other useful content which would inform their reading choices and otherwise be completely inaccessible behind a borrow. If anyone is interested in helping us move the needle on such an effort, please do get in touch and we'd be glad to invite you to Open Library's slack channel.
- aaroninsf 7y ago
  The OCR text (and ABBYY) for about 15 millions are already available today, e.g. c.f. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=format:abbyy&fl=identifier,format&rows=25&output=json&sort=downloads+desc https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=format:abbyy&fl=ide... The ABBYY files are raw output of OCR, but most "items" on the Archive also include the extracted plain text. It's noisy but generally quite readable. A few heuristics would pass pretty clean copy to GPT-2.
FillardMillmore 7y ago
> Now libraries who deaccession to BWB can have even greater social impact, because the Internet Archive will acquire, digitize, lend, store and digitally preserve millions of books from BWB’s inventory over the next few years Perhaps this is an obvious question with an obvious answer but how will this work in relation to copyrights? I know that many copyrights expire and sometimes the copyrights are forfeited and as a result many creative works from long ago end up in the public domain. But what is the plan here to achieve this mission while respecting copyrights?
- jamesgeck0 7y ago
  They appear to be treating this like a digital library. From the Wired article[1]: > you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. The two page preview should be defensible as fair use; this is less than what Google's archived books allow you to view, for example. The legal details of the borrowing process are further documented here[2]: > We have recently made available a small number of books (currently 61 books) published between 1923 and 1941 under a provision of US Copyright law that was written to permit libraries to copy and lend titles that are no longer subject to commercial exploitation, and selection is currently overseen by lawyers expert in US copyright law.[3] It sounds like as long as a book in the last twenty years of copyright and is out of print, it might well be fair game for archival and lending. I'm not sure about books more recent than that. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-more-reliable/ https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-more-... 2. https://blog.archive.org/2018/01/24/digital-books-on-archive-org/ https://blog.archive.org/2018/01/24/digital-books-on-archive... 3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3049158 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3049158
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    I think you have found a lot of the relevant law. The relevant laws are definitely not _entirely_ clearcut. Especially in how it applies to making a digital copy like this. Which means they aren't entirely clearcut against them either. But someone could certainly try suing them. Apparently IA is willing to be a bit risk forward here. But if they're only doing out of print books, there's less likely to be someone who _wants_ to sue them (a lot of old out of print books are basically "orphaned", there is no identifiable copyright owner, which is what a lot of the relevant laws are targetted at), and if someone did want to sue them, they'd have less chance of winning for an out of print book. (It's not entirely clear to me they're only doing out of print books?) Don't forget that Google's ability to scan and offer previews of books as 'fair use' was the subject of a multi-year lawsuit too! Which ended in a settlement, not a court ruling...
vallismortis 7y ago
I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that have historical value and never should have left the Smithsonian.
- ryana 7y ago
  Those are probably books from Academic Library partners, since they tend to have the rarest and most valuable stock. Every book that comes in gets scanned and assessed to one of a few possible streams: - List for sale across all markets - Donation (too many of that title in inventory, desired by one of the specific literacy partners) - Recycling (too many of that title in inventory, not desired by literacy partner, or condition too poor) - ARC Books That last business line is the Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectible group. These books are diverted to a team of people whose sole job is to manually price these books and work with rare book dealers as well as some of the more high-end marketplaces to move them. This went for more than books as well, as sometimes there were interesting related pieces that came in the door. Also, fwiw, when I was there any book like this that sold for > $500 had a whole separate commission structure where at least half of the sale price would go to the group that sourced the book. So if an academic library sent a book from the early 1800's, and that sold for $15,000, they library would get $7,500 back.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Were they literally from the Smithsonian? Either way, libraries/librarians deaccession books all the time that outsiders might think "that's so valuable, why'd you get rid of it?" There is only so much budget/space to store stuff. You get rid of stuff that is no longer relevant to your mission, or lots of other libraries have so you don't need one too, or just isn't _as_ important to your users/mission as other stuff. No library has infinite space.
  - cestith 7y ago
    You also reclaim space if you have multiple copies of a work and the demand for the title in your collection is limited. So even if you've received a copy that was formerly from some library they may have kept a copy or two if they used to have a dozen in circulation.
cable2600 7y ago
How is this different from this project? https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ It seems books that are so old they enter the public domain end up at Gutenberg in eBook format. I had a friend of mine, Mike Crawford, who died. He refused to put his works in a book and put it up on websites. Well nobody can maintain his website but if he did a book and submitted it to Gutenberg under creative commons his work would live on past him. Many books are on websites for free with advertising or donations to keep them running.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  (1) Project Gutenberg offers fully transcribed books (not just OCR) that are also reformatted to be readable in the browser (or as EPUB's). The Internet Archive just stops at the scanning stage and provides page images. (2) The Internet Archive apparently has some arrangement to "lend" books that are still under copyright, and most (if not all) of the books that BWB supplies to them are going to fall under that. But they do have a lot of stuff that's totally out of copyright too, with no such restriction. Even PG (as well as its sister site, Distributed Proofreaders) takes a lot of their "source" material from the IA.

389 points by l1n 7y ago

Any alternative to Google's land grab of intellectual rights to the books they digitize (in a horrible quality to boot) can only be a good thing.

zozbot234 7y ago
Doesn't Google Books push a lot of their PD content to the Internet Archive themselves? That doesn't seem like an undue "land grab", it seems like they're being good net citizens for once.

mindcrime 7y ago

Hmm... so, at first blush at least, this sounds like a pretty Big Deal, and a Good Thing. From the press release: Better World Books, the world’s leading socially conscious online bookseller, is now owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, not-for-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner the Internet Archive. This groundbreaking partnership will allow both organizations to pursue their collective mission of making knowledge universally accessible to readers everywhere. This new relationship will provide additional resources and newfound synergies backed by a shared enthusiasm for advancing global literacy. Together, the two organizations are expanding the digital frontier of book preservation to ensure books are accessible to all for generations to come. This new relationship will allow Better World Books to provide a steady stream of books to be digitized by the Internet Archive, thereby growing its digital holdings to millions of books. Libraries that work alongside Better World Books will now make a bigger impact than ever. Any book that does not yet exist in digital form will go into a pipeline for future digitization, preservation and access. Sounds good to me. Of course, there's a big difference between issuing a press release and actually doing something. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in reality.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jjeaff 7y ago
Better World Books has in my experience been purposefully misleading about the structure and purpose of their business. They put book donation boxes everywhere that are covered in "save the children" style graphics and messages. But the reality is, they are a for profit company that very much enriched the owners while donating a very small percentage to charity. And it's one thing to have a corporation that does social good. But their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity. They also make deals with public libraries to sell their books online and take a big cut. Which makes me suspicious of this new arrangement. So it is now a for profit corporation owned by a non-profit? Did the owners decide to reorganize or donate the whole business or something?
- ryana 7y ago
  As a prior BWB employee (with no equity or outcome from this sale) I'm happy to respond to some of these concerns. "Very much enriched the owners" is quite a stretch. Especially considering pretty much every equity holder was wiped out ~5 years ago when they had to raise money to stay in business. The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco. Before that he lived in a townhome in suburban Atlanta. This business is not and never has thrown off cash. At best they've made as much money in profit as they've donated, in cash, to literacy causes over the life of the business. A "very small percentage" donated to charity is up for debate based on everyone's belief of what that means, but all charity payments were made as a percentage of net sales revenue, which was essentially the money that came in from any sale. The only cost that was subtracted out was marketplace fees when selling on Amazon, ebay, etc. Sales percentage back to the book sources (academic and public libraries) and non-profit partners (on all sales from all sources) were paid out before shipping costs were even accounted for. "Their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity" is not true. Drop box books accounted for < 10% of all books sourced and even less than that of revenue since those books are typically the lowest quality stream (slightly better title mix than thrift purchases, but much higher logistics cost and risk of spoilage). The business is almost entirely dependent on public and academic library partnerships. There were many, MANY monthly all hands meetings we sat in where the business lost money but wrote 6 or 7 figure checks to literacy partners. Donations were not a function of making money. BWB was a great company full of people who truly cared about the mission. Some people did well, but nobody got rich off this business. If they didn't move most of the corporate activity out of Atlanta and up to Indiana I would still have been happy to keep working there.

dublinben 7y ago

Original source on the Internet Archive blog: https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy-better-world-books-and-the-internet-archive-unite-to-preserve-millions-of-books/ https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy...

macawfish 7y ago

These days, my mind immediately jumps to "what if you plugged all those books into GPT-2!?"

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mekarpeles 7y ago
mek here from Internet Archive's openlibrary.org project. We've been in broad talks w/ folks like OpenAI about how the contents of texts may be used to power better discovery and to increase usefulness of books. Open Library is pretty far from GPT-2, but we do have fulltext search across ~3.5M books: http://openlibrary.org/search/inside http://openlibrary.org/search/inside We're also an open source project [https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary] and happy to collaborate w/ folks on such projects. I'm personally very inspired by the https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-booklamp/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-booklamp/ Booklamp project; building a genome for every book and surfacing as much content as we can to help patrons discover citations, quotes, and other useful content which would inform their reading choices and otherwise be completely inaccessible behind a borrow. If anyone is interested in helping us move the needle on such an effort, please do get in touch and we'd be glad to invite you to Open Library's slack channel.
aaroninsf 7y ago
The OCR text (and ABBYY) for about 15 millions are already available today, e.g. c.f. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=format:abbyy&fl=identifier,format&rows=25&output=json&sort=downloads+desc https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=format:abbyy&fl=ide... The ABBYY files are raw output of OCR, but most "items" on the Archive also include the extracted plain text. It's noisy but generally quite readable. A few heuristics would pass pretty clean copy to GPT-2.

FillardMillmore 7y ago

> Now libraries who deaccession to BWB can have even greater social impact, because the Internet Archive will acquire, digitize, lend, store and digitally preserve millions of books from BWB’s inventory over the next few years Perhaps this is an obvious question with an obvious answer but how will this work in relation to copyrights? I know that many copyrights expire and sometimes the copyrights are forfeited and as a result many creative works from long ago end up in the public domain. But what is the plan here to achieve this mission while respecting copyrights?

jamesgeck0 7y ago
They appear to be treating this like a digital library. From the Wired article[1]: > you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. The two page preview should be defensible as fair use; this is less than what Google's archived books allow you to view, for example. The legal details of the borrowing process are further documented here[2]: > We have recently made available a small number of books (currently 61 books) published between 1923 and 1941 under a provision of US Copyright law that was written to permit libraries to copy and lend titles that are no longer subject to commercial exploitation, and selection is currently overseen by lawyers expert in US copyright law.[3] It sounds like as long as a book in the last twenty years of copyright and is out of print, it might well be fair game for archival and lending. I'm not sure about books more recent than that. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-more-reliable/ https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-more-... 2. https://blog.archive.org/2018/01/24/digital-books-on-archive-org/ https://blog.archive.org/2018/01/24/digital-books-on-archive... 3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3049158 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3049158
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  I think you have found a lot of the relevant law. The relevant laws are definitely not _entirely_ clearcut. Especially in how it applies to making a digital copy like this. Which means they aren't entirely clearcut against them either. But someone could certainly try suing them. Apparently IA is willing to be a bit risk forward here. But if they're only doing out of print books, there's less likely to be someone who _wants_ to sue them (a lot of old out of print books are basically "orphaned", there is no identifiable copyright owner, which is what a lot of the relevant laws are targetted at), and if someone did want to sue them, they'd have less chance of winning for an out of print book. (It's not entirely clear to me they're only doing out of print books?) Don't forget that Google's ability to scan and offer previews of books as 'fair use' was the subject of a multi-year lawsuit too! Which ended in a settlement, not a court ruling...

vallismortis 7y ago

I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that have historical value and never should have left the Smithsonian.

ryana 7y ago
Those are probably books from Academic Library partners, since they tend to have the rarest and most valuable stock. Every book that comes in gets scanned and assessed to one of a few possible streams: - List for sale across all markets - Donation (too many of that title in inventory, desired by one of the specific literacy partners) - Recycling (too many of that title in inventory, not desired by literacy partner, or condition too poor) - ARC Books That last business line is the Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectible group. These books are diverted to a team of people whose sole job is to manually price these books and work with rare book dealers as well as some of the more high-end marketplaces to move them. This went for more than books as well, as sometimes there were interesting related pieces that came in the door. Also, fwiw, when I was there any book like this that sold for > $500 had a whole separate commission structure where at least half of the sale price would go to the group that sourced the book. So if an academic library sent a book from the early 1800's, and that sold for $15,000, they library would get $7,500 back.
jrochkind1 7y ago
Were they literally from the Smithsonian? Either way, libraries/librarians deaccession books all the time that outsiders might think "that's so valuable, why'd you get rid of it?" There is only so much budget/space to store stuff. You get rid of stuff that is no longer relevant to your mission, or lots of other libraries have so you don't need one too, or just isn't _as_ important to your users/mission as other stuff. No library has infinite space.
- cestith 7y ago
  You also reclaim space if you have multiple copies of a work and the demand for the title in your collection is limited. So even if you've received a copy that was formerly from some library they may have kept a copy or two if they used to have a dozen in circulation.

cable2600 7y ago

How is this different from this project? https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ It seems books that are so old they enter the public domain end up at Gutenberg in eBook format. I had a friend of mine, Mike Crawford, who died. He refused to put his works in a book and put it up on websites. Well nobody can maintain his website but if he did a book and submitted it to Gutenberg under creative commons his work would live on past him. Many books are on websites for free with advertising or donations to keep them running.

zozbot234 7y ago
(1) Project Gutenberg offers fully transcribed books (not just OCR) that are also reformatted to be readable in the browser (or as EPUB's). The Internet Archive just stops at the scanning stage and provides page images. (2) The Internet Archive apparently has some arrangement to "lend" books that are still under copyright, and most (if not all) of the books that BWB supplies to them are going to fall under that. But they do have a lot of stuff that's totally out of copyright too, with no such restriction. Even PG (as well as its sister site, Distributed Proofreaders) takes a lot of their "source" material from the IA.