US objects to Google book deal

Source: BBC News

The US Justice Department has urged a New York court to reject a deal that would allow internet company Google to publish millions of books online.

The deal raised copyright and anti-trust issues, the department said, and should be rejected in its current form.

The court is due to rule on the issue early next month.

Under the deal - the product of a legal suit - Google would establish a $125m (£77m) fund to compensate those whose works it published online.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8264544.stm

Not as annoying as adolescent webpages with black backgrounds and blue text, but not something I would sit down to read from "cover to cover".

Just because something is available in a searchable, digital form does not mean that has to be the form that someone chooses to read, cover-to-cover. Too many people like actual books for them to ever disappear, imho. I imagine that eventually it will just get to a publish-on-demand format, where only those books that people actually want to read in hard copy, will be printed on paper. And that can't be a bad thing, environmentally speaking.

I have thousands of books in my personal library, but with Google having indexed them, now I can search through them for specific content. I think it is freakin awesome.

Plus, another thing: lately my preferred format is the audio book, because I can "read" so many more books that way. Sadly, though, most of the books I want to read are not available as audio books. But, if they are digitized, they are one step closer to becoming an audio book. I cannot stand the current robo-readers, so right now I only opt for human read books. But I can see (in fact, I'm sure it's already ongoing) a crowdsourcing project where books are read by volunteers into audio format.

I just can't see this as bad. We lost a huge chunk of our history when the library at Alexandria was burned down. And of course, other libraries as well. Digitizing the content will at least make it, ironically, more durable.

How would Google be any worse than the artistic pirating going on in China??? Assholes.

........wants to stop it.

Google does not want to infringe on anyone's current copyrights.....

...fact is the US government (the beloved Obama) and most capitalists in the US are control freaks.....AFRAID of the free flow of information.

Your use of the word "beloved" is interesting, but it's not about being a control freak.

Try selling a book sometime...

in multiple languages. Then spend some time poring over maps and deciphering half-assed documentation while listening to poorly-taped oral histories. Now spend six months writing your book and another six rewriting it, then wait a year for the publisher to get the damned thing out.

After all that effort do you really think that book should be free? That the writer is somehow a corporate greedhead because he wants to be fairly compensated for his often-exhaustive efforts?

The people who cry loudest for the "free flow of information" are the people who have never contributed a single word to our intellectual heritage.

Information technology is changing everything. What you described could nowadays be describing a blogger, someone who does the same amount of research and then publishes the info online, for anyone to see. That's just the reality of how things are changing.

And for authors, the amount of digital data that's available to them, compared to having to hand-scour through thousands of books in hundreds of libraries around the world -- that's got to be helpful to them too.

The old paradigm will make way for the new paradigm. Only change is constant.

was made on the topic. Maybe this is somehow a good idea but I don't think Google is the right organization to carry it out.

I don't think they have any bad faith in doing this, they have made available options for copyright holders, etc.

The very idea that all of these books will be SEARCHABLE is what's important in this project, imho. If I know I can find something specific in a book, I'm willing to purchase the hard copy or whatever.

It's all about the indexing!

Curiously, I've recently been reconsidering book purchases, because once assembled into a 'personal' library, they are no longer searchable.

Explain? Thanks.

(of extracting information from text) I'm not sure how to better explain it than that. It's not indexing like a card catalog had years ago, a title summary, Google's is actual full text indexing, even though returned results are crippled.

A purchased book cannot be searched in the same way, nor can a collection of one's purchased books be searched in the same way. Only the books in Google's "library" or system can be searched.

I've got several thousand books at my home. Not one of them is searchable, nevermind all of them. Why not? I paid for them. Since I've purchased those books, and have full access to their text, no crippled or partial results or pages missing, it somehow seems I should be able to search them. But no. Not possible without more digitization than I care to do.

If I purchase an ebook from a publisher, it's most usually encrypted, so once again, it's still not searchable from my own various computers, though it can be "unlocked" for the purposes of reading it, and that tool used to "unlock" it may offer some rudimentary search capability on the single platform the unlock tool runs on. But what if you want to perform a search not just of one book, but every encrypted book you've ever bought?

IF publishers sold their books in unencrypted form, it shouldn't be too much work to put them on a home server (not for public access, just for internal use), then they can be searched from any computer in the local network.

Since most books are not sold that way, why not just use a Google search instead when one is looking for information.

I suppose it would be possible for Google to have a system where if you purchase a book, they could offer purchasers full-text search rights in perpetuity.

Look at Amazon Kindle. Amazon can delete a purchased book in the customer's supposed "possession" at Amazon's will. Sure, they recently reversed that decision (you have to "request" that it be reversed), but the capability is there. Is that "Kindle bookshelf", and all the books contained therein, text searchable from one's other, desktop computer, or the laptop, or the kitchen computer (for recipes)? And what Happens when Amazon comes out with Kindle 2 or 3? Will Kindle 1, and all the books it contains, be like the useless Analog TV I have sitting around here that's no longer able to receive any local broadcasts, because all broadcasts are now digital?

Google built a better model for extracting specific information from text. By doing so, they've obsoleted older ways of getting information, such as purchasing a book for a slow, deliberate reading, where 99.9999% of the words read are not specifically what you were looking for at that moment.

However, I think that Google *does* have a way to help you. For example (this is what I plan to do with my library) you can create a list/spreadsheet of all your titles (I'm going to use a barcode scanner) and then use Google's search tool to search the content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q95ywcuGuTM

Go to about the 3 minute point to hear specifically what I'm talking about.

Even if a copyright owner does not want all the content available, the seach function will still work. And since you already have the hard copy, this is fine for you.

There are legitimate copyright and anti-trust issues.

Anybody vying to become a professional writer for a living will understand why.

In Modern Corporatist America profits are more important than freedom of information.

What about the writer's right to be compensated for his work?

The length of time it takes before books become public domain is far too long.

from Wiki:

"A work that is created (i.e. fixed in tangible form for the first time) after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is given a term lasting for the author’s life, plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death. In the case of “a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire,” the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author’s identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter."

That is BS, and for the most part only helps of the publisher, especially when the person is dead. 30 years would be far more reasonable.

"to publish millions of books online."

"Google would establish a $125m (£77m) fund to compensate those whose works it published online. "


$125 million to compensate for millions of books?

Those words just appear, nobody actually busts their hump writing them. And I'm certain that the "free flow of information" people work their own jobs for free, totally uncompensated for their efforts.

Right?

When books still under copyright are scanned, you cannot read them in their entirety. You either get a limited number of preview pages or just a page which describes the book. The pages have links to buy the books at various outlets.

Often enough, out-of-copy public domain books exist in only 1 or 2 university libraries. I think making works like that available online is a good thing.