- Clancy mentioned that Google was NOT going for archival quality (indeed COULD not) in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned
– about 70% of the book project use was coming from India.
- 92% of the world’s books are not generating revenues for copyright holders or publishers

If Googl Book Search really interests you, you might also like to read The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story [pdf, today's library link o' the day] which discusses some of the misinformation and lawsuits surrounding the Google Library porject and comes down on the side of Google’s fair use position.

Vision of an Open Library

The Web is So post-1996, what about older content?

Everyone is part of it: Amazon helps “expand the bookstore” but we’re looking for inclusivity.

“A great library for the published works of humankind, accessible to all… everybody involved… libraries LIVE based on the publishing system, they will be involved.”

3 to 4 billion of the 12 billion libraries spend every year goes to publishing. Let’s have more of that go to fairly compensating everyone.

“For the near term, we’re making books from books.” It’s hard to digitze a book that looks like the original, this is the proof that can work.

1. Selection. librarians choose books. Start with out of copyright materials, work towards in print, orphans next. “we’re not going to run out”
2. Scanning. 500 dpi “scribe system” 30-60 min per book. “we can read a 2 pt typeface, straight on” metadata, saved to archive
3. Cataloging. Use library data and coordinate between scanning centers using MetaFetch. Groups like RLG are coordinating.
4. Copyright. Copyright law is “a little confusing” Evidence based interface allows a Q&A “is this book under copyright” interrogation. Many books not re-registered copyright-wise. Already scanned copyright renewal records into a searchable database. Larry Lessig is bringing a suit re: orphan works and whether they can be in the virtual library. Other for-profits are working back the other way. It’s “tricky but doable”
5. Storage. 6 GB per book, hard to scale. Built a petabyte-scale machine “petabox” [I saw it] low power, runs cool, “set top boxes” not full computers with OSes etc. Object is not to have one box in an earthquake zone, but distributed system in flood zones & elsewhere.
6. Readers. Software. Check it out at openlibrary.org. UC librarians chose early set of books already scanned. Also looking into PDFs for printing. Also working with lulu.com for print on demand. Also, you can listen to these books.

Other mentioned projects: ICDL, Internet Archive Bookmobile [buck a book!]. BookShare will use this content for access for the blind. $100 laptop will be integrating books from this project onto their laptops [big news!]. Open Content Alliance to create protocols and formats.

Brewster Kahle: “I don’t know what it will be like to have books from our libraries injected into our culture again, but I’d like to see it”

“Knowledge for the World” is the mantra that all the funders [on and off the podium, 30 seconds each: Smithsonian (museums/content), Yahoo, Sloan Foundation (funding), Johns Hopkins (content/tech), RLG (cataloging), Adobe (display/doc formatting), HP (scan), LizardTech (data compression), Lulu.com (printing), MSN Search (search/funding) etc]

Guy from Yahoo “Finally a library I won’t get thrown out of” and “Find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge”

Andrea has more, including some links that I missed.

Siva “Once again, I think we should recognize that unless we think copyright should not exist, copyright holders should be able to decide when to license their works to other companies. This is far from absolute. But it’s common sense and generally true. Only in unusual circumstances, such as when markets fail to provide an essential public good, should we consider radical moves. This is not one of those cases. The service is not an essential public good — just a cool idea. And the market was not failing. Publishers were at the table…. Google messed up by going all unilateral on the publishers. There was no market failure here. Transaction costs were not prohibitive. They were working out the deal. This was not the recording industry shunning Napster. This was how copyright is supposed to work.”

Seth: Why is Google doing this book-scanning project? It’s not because it’s just so cool (even if it is). While coolness may justify a small-scale promotional project, the scanning efforts are expensive. So Google, as a company, obviously sees some value in the effort. This is not wrong. But it’s also a direct conflict with the granted monopoly know as copyright. Whenever there is value, particularly commercial value, there is conflict over who should be able to receive it.

• UM needs to find a way to restrict automated access, downloading of its content, or others making its content available for commercial purposes. This is more restrictive than public domain.
• Further UM agrees to restrict use of its content to “persons having a need to access such materials” and makes particular mention to those materials not being “disseminated to the public at large” this m ay be nothing serious, or it may be
• Google is a third party beneficiary of any agreement UM enters into with regards to the UM Digital Copy and any cooperative web service agreement such as the Digital Library Federation
• Google agrees to always make searching and showing search results of the content free.

It’s fascinating reading. I am certainly not a lawyer or copyright expert, I would be very interested in what other people have to say about this.

“The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitisation is) by a commercial organisation of works that are still in copyright,” she wrote. “It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied.”

Morris wrote that Google needs to obtain permission from publishers before using their work. While she wrote that it may be impractical to ask every publisher, Google should ask permission through collective licensing organizations.

Also interesting, seems that while Google Print actually destroys the books it scans, Google Print Library does not.