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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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>, 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.

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.

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.

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.

> I wouldn't be eager to continue on with a project after getting that reception either.

So google's feelings got hurt? Give me a break. Obviously they were primarily motivated by attracting the almighty user attention, and positive pr to their brand, all part of a long term strategy for money, and that didn't work out so well, and they never cared much about doing a public good, or else they would continue to support the over 1 million public domain books they have. Or, if they really cared, they would have put code of their books site out as free software, and helped share their entire collection of public domain books with other organizations.

The problem is that they cannot do that easily. It's no longer a little company, it's a giant with it's own clauses and rules. Maybe founders want to do good, but now, they are stuck with this big behemoth of a company they created and unfortunately, they live in denial that they can do good, despite the fact that the primary goals have shifted towards making money at all costs.

It's not about feelings getting hurt, it's about trying to do something that you consider good and actively being fought against for it. Of course it's more likely you're going to give up in that situation because it's a lot more difficult to succeed if people are fighting you every step of the way than if you have support and help.

To use an analogy, if someone gets their car stuck on a snowy road I'm going to go help dig them out. If they start shoveling show to re-bury their tires I'm not going to continue helping them.

If those books were from the British Library, then they're available for free online from the British Library

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