Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
And like the article mentioned, there already exist much better catalogues (or whatever they are called) such as the library of congress one. They might not be perfect but they sure beat scanning a book cover and picking the first date found. Why not just license it?
There's nothing in the Constitution that gives the Federal government the authority (let alone the responsibility to do this).
the idea of this being in the hands of a single corporation is unnerving.
And having it controlled by the government would make you breathe a sigh of relief? The opportunities for curating the collection as in 1984 are scary enough, but consider the accuracy of government data in other areas.
The FAA is a little grayer, and I wouldn't necessarily mind losing it. But I can see it sneaking in under the (much abused) Interstate Commerce Clause, also in Article I Section 8.
I can't put my finger on anything authorizing a giant library. Maybe under the "necessary and proper" clause, with a claim that they need a comprehensive library at hand in order to research for the government's other responsibilities (in real life, do they actually use it for that?).
I cannot imagine how granting such unlimited power to the President is congruent with any rational reading of the Constitution. Do you really believe that the founders who insisted that the President couldn't be trusted with the ability to declare war would be happy giving the President complete authority to annihilate entire cities at his sole discretion?
Really?
I would say promoting the general welfare includes making all non-copyrighted materials publicly available. Clearly we differ on this but the assertion that it's unconstitutional is not so clear cut as you make it to be.
Making that information digitally accessible would seem to be a natural extension of that, in much the same way that being able to look up regulations, legislation, court decisions etc. online has vastly simplified and lowered the cost of research. True, there's nothing explicit about the internet in the Constitution. I sometimes wonder how you can bring yourself to use the internet, considering how it's an out-of-control government boondoggle and all.
Interesting, I was not aware of this. Can you cite evidence?
I sometimes wonder how you can bring yourself to use the internet
Exaggerate much?
In any case, the Internet's underlying technology was developed by the DoD. Today, the infrastructure is private. To be honest, I'm not clear on where bodies like ICANN fall, in the public/private space. Can someone enlighten me?
Surely. I'll put Google books links in the same order as the legal citations.
Beginning with the copyright act of 1790, 1 Stat 124, those seeking copyright protection were required to deposit a copy of the work in question with the office of the secretary of State. http://books.google.com/books?id=u90WAAAAIAAJ&dq=%22unit...
At this time, the Library of congress didn't even exist; it was established in 1800 when the US moved the government to it's current location in DC. The post of Librarian was made a paid position in 1802, and in 1815 the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's (much larger) personal library for ~$25,000 was authorized following a fire which destroyed the most of the books in the Congressional library. At this time it was not a public library, but only for use of members of the government - first Congress, then the executive, and later members of the judiciary. Although it kept expanding, it was basically a private reference library.
By 1844 many thought the US should have a national library of some sort - something Jefferson himself had urged, arguing that there was no subject on which congress might not at some point wish to research as part of its lawmaking activity. The generous bequest of James Smithson led congress to pass on 8/10/1846 an act to establish the "Smithsonian Institution, for the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge among Men." Article 10 of this amended the Copyright act of 1831, directing that copies of all copyrighted works should henceforth be deposited with both the Smithsonian and the LoC, 9 Stat 106. http://books.google.com/books?id=TGcZAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22unit...
By 1859 neither the Smithsonian nor the LoC had established themselves as clear 'national' libraries, with varying complaints about the completeness of their collections, accuracy of the catalogs and so on. Development of LoC had been set back several years by another fire in 1852, as well as the need to service new, smaller, libraries for the sole use of the House and Senate. The situation had become confusing, so in the meantime Congress passed "An act for keeping and distributing all public documents," 11 Stat 138, which directed that copyright and patent materials still held by the Secretary of State be transferred to the Department of the Interior, apparently on the theory that the DoI was best placed to service requests for copies and catalogs from libraries in the individual states. http://books.google.com/books?id=vio3AAAAIAAJ&dq=1859%20...
The Civil war interrupted matters, and Lincoln's first appointee as Librarian spent most of the war out in the field After it had ended, a new librarian took over named Ainsworth Spofford, who was dedicated to the original idea of a national library. His efforts led to the passage of legislation bringing copyright deposits back to the LoC (13 Stat 540 (1865)); the Smithsonian deposit, which moved the whole Smithsonian collection into the LoC and for the first time provided in law that it should be fully accessible to the public except for one month a year during recess, to make repairs (14 Stat 13 (1867)), and amendment to the Copyright making registration with the LoC mandatory on pain of a fine (14 Stat 395 (1867)); and the Copyright Act of 1870, which left the Department of the Interior in sole charge of patents and trademarks, and made the LoC the sole organ for registration and (mandatory) deposit of copyrighted works (16 Stat 198, pp212-216). http://books.google.com/books?id=u90WAAAAIAAJ&dq=%22unit...
The International Copyright Law of 1891 set up reciprocal recognition of other countries' copyrights, conditional upon deposit of those works in the LoC. All this collecting swelled the volume of works in the library to something approaching half a million, which eventually provided the justification for the purchase of land for and construction of the building which houses the LoC today (after a couple of expensive false starts) in 1896, and in 1897 Congress decided to grant authority to make "rules and regulations for the government of the Library", including administration of copyrights, to the Librarian. http://books.google.com/books?id=uwguAAAAIAAJ&dq=act%20o...
there's general information (beyond the scope of your question) about the development of the library at http://www.loc.gov/loc/legacy/loc.html. You might be surprised to know that the LoC also has (IMHO) the most comprehensive collection of media filespecs, at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/ which is very useful if you're asked to provide a codec for some obscure file format.
The answer in both cases is regulatory capture. The parts of the government that would deal with this have lots of interaction with publishers and authors lobbying them. And those groups hate all the digitization plans.
From the perspective of a content producer, technology is the worst thing ever. Every year, technology advances and increases the number of ways that people can spend time not reading the works of any one author. A mass book digitization program would swamp the market with old books which means fewer sales for recently published books. It might allow people to get into hobbies that would sap up their time and prevent them from buying new books! Can you imagine if Wikipedia didn't exist? Think of the billions of person-hours that wouldn't have been spent reading and writing Wikipedia articles...that time would have gone somewhere, and part of it would certainly have been spent reading best seller books purchased at a book store.
But it seems the usual Google/hackery way of doing things where things are automatised (or semi-automatised), but when it shows (some) shortcomings, they just don't care.
Another example (in my mind) was: the Nexus One customer service.
* note: I'm not really familiar with the court case here, so I have no idea if the author is making a valid assertion or not.
And if instead you were thinking of having Google paying the scholars for that, then could not a random intern at Google do it just as well?
I wasn't aware Google was under any such obligation. If it is, from where did the obligation come, when, and by whose authority?
As mentioned they may have a monopoly on scanning the vast majority of older texts online due to the court settlement and deals with processors. If they are to be the gatekeeper and don't act responsibly then it is really a loss for everyone, regardless if they are bound to or not.
I disagree with their fundamental premise that Google is "the world's last digital library". Google's demonstration that such a thing is actually possible removes one barrier to entry. They have also set a precedent which reduces the negotiation required for future projects.
The fact that Google has done a poor job (so far) on the metadata is something that's worth highlighting - but it's not a reason to curse the whole project. This is fixable, possibly even a transient issue. GBS is an entirely new resource, which scholars have not had before; if they find it unsuitable for scholarly research, perhaps they could continue to use their existing tools or work to improve it, rather than slam the effort as "A Disaster For Scholars". "A Useful Tool Which Still Needs Improvement" might not be as snappy but the The Chronicle Of Higher Education doesn't look like the Daily Mail either.
That was my first reaction too, but then I realized the article was implying that the real barrier to entry is the work of scanning billions of books into digital form.
After Google has done that, there will be little incentive for anyone else to incur that same expense to create a service that Google already has a 5 year head start on.
Alot of startups these days are about finding better ways of doing things in already-crowded domains. Google itself showed the way there. But I'm not sure I disagree with article in its assertion that doing this will be much more difficult, if not virtually impossible, in this domain of creating a digital library from scanned books. There really is a significant moat here.
The thought about all of the necessary resources for this (paper, transportation, storage, etc) makes you almost feel ashamed, because most of the time the amount of desired information is very small.
I would love to abolish this waste and have a service payed for by a flat rate that gives you access to all books, papers, phd-thesises, etc by keystroke. The service should not be completely free in order to maintain the incentive of writing well structured books as way of personal income.
Whether it is Google Book Search or something else, I think humanity definitely needs something like a global digital library.
I'm glad someone is drawing attention to the irresponsible sloppiness.
Until this gets cleaned up, what then, is the fallout from the metadata errors? Researchers will have to verify publishing dates and use other means of search for period pieces, but they will have access to historical texts over the internet. That's still pretty awesome.
[I work for the Internet Archive, but on our web archiving rather than our book projects.]
Whether Google backlinks or otherwise uses the info to improve their own metadata is of course up to them, but Google didn't get where they are by turning down free sources of crawlable quality information.
Once all books are published (or reprinted) in eBook form, the conversion is potentially something which can be automated for all new (or still in "print" books). This will cover the majority of titles of interest.
Additional titles can be scanned where they're of significant interest or projects similar to Project Guttenberg may do some of the work.
Google has a head start but in actual fact has done a lot of their work when it's high cost / high labour where future competitors won't need to invest this level of effort.
You could certainly see publishers providing access to their own works and, having access to the electronic versions of texts even for non-eBooks, they could do so relatively cheaply. Add a standardised interface over the repositories provided by each publisher and you have a decentralised repository, owned by the publishers which you'd imagine could compete with Google.
I think that's unlikely to ever happen, though. There are still thousands of even relatively prominent movies available on VHS that have never been released on DVD, due to a mixture of disputes over rights, expense of mastering a DVD from the source material, worry about whether they'd be sufficiently marketable this many years past their release, worry about too many back-catalogue releases cannibalizing new releases, etc.