Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Softpanorama Search

Electronic Book Libraries

There are several major open book libraries projects:

• Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, launched it 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. It builds a free online library of public domain 'classics'. See Project Gutenberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Like similar initiatives such as Project Bartleby (Founded in 1993, at Columbia University) it's run by volunteers and essentially covers texts/editions that are out of copyright, for example US works whose authors died before 1950. Like much 'volunteer' publishing the quality is uneven. That's probably inevitable, given the emphasis on volunteers and freedom from copyright rather than quality control, formatting and concern with establishing a 'true' text. It's calling for volunteers for data entry and editing of the texts. In 2000, a non-profit corporation, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Inc. was chartered in Mississippi to handle the project's legal needs. Donations to it are tax-deductible. Long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer Gregory Newby became the foundation's first CEO.

  As of December 2005, Project Gutenberg claimed more than 17,000 items in its collection, with new ebooks posted each day..
  
  To read more about the Project Gutenberg organization, choose one of these topics:

  • Project Gutenberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg, an essay from 1992 that still rings true today
  • The Project Gutenberg Mission. This is Michael Hart's FAQ #0
  • Administrivia, about the Project Gutenberg belief in minimalist organizations and in separation of powers. This is Michael Hart's FAQ #1.
  • Principal of Minimal Regulation/Administration. This is FAQ #3 written by Project Gutenberg's Founder, Michael Hart, and PGLAF's Director & CEO, Dr. Gregory B. Newby.
  • Our Fundraising page, with more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
  • Our Volunteering page, with how you can help to create the next new Project Gutenberg eBook.
     
• Project Bartleby  Founded in 1993, at Columbia University, The Public Library of the Internet project implements strict editorial and quality-control procedures and maintains an archive of selected classic works. The project has four major development goals.
  1. Accurate and Loyal Editions Project Bartleby electronic media represent with 100% accuracy an original work--a goal achieved by professional editorial standards that spare no expense in the scanning, data entry, data manipulation, spell-checking, proofreading, and markup protocols. The quality of the services make them suitable for both pleasure reading and professional scholarship.
  2. Free Public Access Project Bartleby media are made available free to the public for educational purposes. Allowing freedom of choice to great literature and reference materials is the foundation of any public library--supporting research, building literacy, and abetting democracy.
  3. Careful, Well-Researched Selection Project Bartleby converted materials originally in the public domain based on some of the following criteria: (a) preponderance of use in educational settings; (b) fairness to works in all literary and reference fields, especially to alternative authors; (c) availability of extant authoritative editions that will not be superseded in print; (d) reference works of general interest; (e) at the request or as a byproduct of academic projects; (f) regard for authors' place in an intellectual history; and (g) above all, a fundamental love for the literary value of the work.
  4. State-of-the-Art Presentation To maintain its role as a leader in electronic-publishing methods, Project Bartleby was committed to explore the presentation and experience of multimedia techniques as they became standardized.
   
• Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video, and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search content. Other participants in the alliance, which was announced Oct. 3, include Microsoft, Adobe Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., the Internet Archive, O'Reilly Media Inc., the University of California, and the University of Toronto.
   
• Google Library The company's library project, launched in December 2004, involves the scanning of out-of-print and copyright works so that their text can be found through the search engine's database. Google is working on the project with libraries at Stanford University, Harvard University and other schools.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - December 14, 2004 - As part of its effort to make offline information searchable online, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google.

"Even before we started Google, we dreamed of making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products. "Today we're pleased to announce this program to digitize the collections of these amazing libraries so that every Google user can search them instantly.

"Our work with libraries further enhances the existing Google Print program, which enables users to find matches within the full text of books, while publishers and authors monetize that information," Page added. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and we're excited to be working with libraries to help make this mission a reality."

Today's announcement is an expansion of the Google Print™ program, which assists publishers in making books and other offline information searchable online. Google is now working with libraries to digitally scan books from their collections, and over time will integrate this content into the Google index, to make it searchable for users worldwide.

"We believe passionately that such universal access to the world's printed treasures is mission-critical for today's great public university," said Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan.

For publishers and authors, this expansion of the Google Print program will increase the visibility of in and out of print books, and generate book sales via "Buy this Book" links and advertising. For users, Google's library program will make it possible to search across library collections including out of print books and titles that weren't previously available anywhere but on a library shelf.

Users searching with Google will see links in their search results page when there are books relevant to their query. Clicking on a title delivers a Google Print page where users can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material. Library content will be displayed in keeping with copyright law. For more information and examples, please visit http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html.

• The Online Books Page The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all. Major parts of the site include:

  • An index of thousands of online books freely readable on the Internet
  • Pointers to significant directories and archives of online texts
  • Special exhibits of particularly interesting classes of online books
  • Information on how readers can help support the growth of online books

  The Online Books Page was founded, and is edited, by John Mark Ockerbloom, He is a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is solely responsible for the content of the site.

  The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Library, who provides the server, disk space, and network bandwidth for the site. They also employ the editor, and support him in his various digital library activities (of which this is but one).

  The online books listed on this page have been authored, placed online, and hosted, by a wide variety of individuals and groups throughout the world (and throughout history!).

  The Online Books Page originally was founded in 1993 by the current editor, while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University. He maintained it there until summer 1999, with Web space and computing resources provided by the School of Computer Science. In 1999, it moved to its present location at Penn.

• UN library project Founded in 2009. Monsly ancient manuscipts

Old News ;-)

Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books Epicenter Wired.com

• By Ryan Singel
• September 17, 2009  | 
• 12:01 am  | 
• Categories: Commerce, Intellectual Property, Media, Search, Wired-o-Nomics

What’s hot off the presses come Thursday?

Any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain.

Over the last seven years, Google has scanned millions of dusty tomes from deep in the stacks of the nation’s leading university libraries and turned them into searchable documents available anywhere in the world through its search box.

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.)

That means you can stop into the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and for less than $10, custom-order your own copy of Dame Curtsey’s Book of Candy Making, the third edition of which was published in 1920 and which can only be found online for $47.00 used.

Dane Neller, On Demand Books CEO, says the announcement flips book distribution on its head.

“We believe this is a revolution,” Neller said. “Content retrieval is now centralized and production is decentralized.”

Neller said the deal was clearly about the long tail of books, a reference to Wired magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson’s theory that hits become less important when distribution costs drop. One of the main benefits, according to Neller, is letting local book stores compete with Amazon.com by reducing their need to have expensive inventory.

Other current retailers include the University of Michigan Shapiro Library Building in Ann Arbor; the Blackwell Bookshop in London; the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt; the University of Alberta Bookstore in Edmonton, Canada; and Angus & Robertson Bookstore in Melbourne, Australia. The company hopes to sell 60 more printers in the next year, bringing the number of machines globally to about 90.

On Demand Books suggests that book stores price the books at about $8, leaving retailers with a $3 profit after both Google and On Demand Books collect a buck-a-book fee. Google plans to donate its share to a yet-unspecified charity, which might be a reaction to its messy legal and public policy fight over a copyright settlement that covers books that are still in copyright. (All the books that are being added to On Demand Books repertoire in this agreement are out of copyright in the country where it will be printed.)

Starting Sept. 29, Bostonians can stop in the privately owned Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have their books printed in front of them. Or they can order it over the phone and have the store deliver it — by bicycle.

There’s a certain irony to that, too, according to Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson, since the bookstore is right next to Harvard’s library, one of the libraries that partnered with Google to turn its millions of books into an online library of the future.

“Most people can’t get into the Harvard Library, but you can print their books next door,” Johnson said.

Or put another way, On Demand Books is betting that in the future, every old book will have 15 readers.

What’s of interest in these old books?

Plenty, according to Google.

One knitter discovered a long-lost book about knitting, and recreated the heirloom pieces and even built a loom from a long-lost design. Another reader, who works with subsistence farmers in Africa, currently uses PDFs of old farming techniques to teach still-relevant skills.

Google already uses the public-domain books in search results, and users can read those books in full online and even download them as PDFs for free.

Neither Neller or Johnson cared to speculate on how many of these books they expect to sell, but Johnson says some 80 percent of the public-domain books are looked at in a given month.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the number of public domain books will grow larger anytime soon, since Congress added two decades to existing copyright protection in 1999. Copyright, which originally lasts about 14 years, now extends to the life of an author plus 70 years for newly created works.

As for their quality?

They feel like a typical paperback, and are printed using typical 20- or 24-pound paper, with heavier stock for the inkjet-printed cover, which currently all share one design.

While turning bits back into paper seems a bit of a stretch for Google, Johnson said it fits with the company’s goal of organizing the world’s information.

“We think people should be able to find and read these books,” Johnson said. “We don’t care how people end up reading them.”

Neller said he’d love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but Google says that’s a long way off.

So for now, book buyers of the future who want to buy books from the past will need to walk to a bookstore — or get Harvard Bookstore to use the bicycle, a 19th-century invention, to bring them a book printed with 21st-century technology.

Photos: PrintOnDemand Espresso printer, image courtesy PrintOnDemand. Printed Books from Google’s Book Search, Wired.com/John Snyder

See Also:

• The Fight over the Google of All Libraries: A Wired.com FAQ
• Amazon Scoffs at Google’s Offer to Share Book Search Sales
• Sony Sides With Google in ‘Library of Future’ Settlement

[Apr 21, 2009] BBC NEWS Entertainment UN puts global treasures online

Currently pretty disorganized and of extremely varying quality (some junk)

A website offering free access to rare manuscripts, books, films and maps from around the world is being launched by the UN's cultural agency.

Unesco says the World Digital Library will help to promote curiosity and understanding across cultures.

Among the artefacts are a 1,000-year-old Japanese novel and the earliest known map to mention America by name.

About a tenth of the 1,200 exhibits are from Africa - the oldest an 8,000-year-old painting of bleeding antelopes.

But this is an ongoing project in its early stages, and the collection is expected to grow substantially.

The World Digital Library was first mooted in 2005 by James Billington, librarian at the US Library of Congress, the world's biggest library.

The project hopes to expand access to "non-Western" items - though the largest number of items digitised so far are from Europe.

The material is drawn from about 30 libraries and archives across the world, and will be made available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

By making cultural treasures accessible to a huge audience, Unesco also hopes to reduce what it sees as a digital divide between rich and poor.

The project is the third such big digitalisation project. Last year the European Union's digital library crashed within hours of its launch, but it is up and running now.

See World Digital Library Home

[Dec 22, 2008] http://www.academicinfo.net/compsci.html

Introduction

Computer science is the overarching title attributed to the discipline of utilizing computation and information in computer systems. Whereas computer programmers create source code and use programming language to make software, the computer scientist uses these software applications for practical purposes and to understand and utilize computational systems.

Computer Science Books

To master computer science, you will have to do a lot of reading on the subject. While your specific program may recommend certain computer science books to you, you will do well to read as many of the best computer science books as you can get your hands on. Some good texts to start with include 'The C Programming Language' by Brian W. Kernighan, 'C++ Primer' by Stanley B. Lippman, 'Introduction to Algorithms' by Thomas H. Cormen, 'Introduction to the Theory of Computation' by Michael Sipser and 'Concrete Mathematics, a Foundation for Computer Science' by Ronald L. Graham. Places to find computer science books online include Amazon.com, FreeTechBooks.com and your school library website.

Computer Science Articles And Databases

A terrific source of computer science articles is the Citeseer.Continuity database. This database lists all the most cited articles in computer science from 2006 back to 1990, so you have a great chance of finding the article you need, whether it be for research, information or to verify a theory. The database, is updated on a regular basis.

Online Computer Science Journals

Of course, most of the key computer science articles will be found in leading computer science journals. There is no shortage of computer science journals out there, many of which may be accessible through your school libraryís web page, the web pages of other libraries or through other computer science resources online. Some of these include Artificial Intelligence, Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the Journal of Web Semantics and Logical Methods in Computer Science.

[Apr 26, 2008]Competition In the Free Textbook Market

Slashdot

"The NYTimes has an editorial plugging Flat World Knowledge, a startup that will offer college textbooks inexpensively (~$30) in print, and free as PDFs. They plan to make their profits from add-ons like podcast study guides and mobile phone flashcards. Books will be licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. Mashups and customizations are encouraged, but the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia. Other companies trying to find a workable business model for free textbooks include Ink Textbooks (revenue from online homework) and Freeload Press (revenue from ads inside the books). So far, none of these companies seems to have succeeded in building up much of a catalog of books; it seems more common for authors of free textbooks to take a DIY approach, putting PDFs on their own web pages, and sometimes arranging on-demand printing with vanity-press publishers like lulu.com. Lots and lots of web sites exist to help people find free textbooks, and CalPIRG has an active campaign pushing for affordable textbooks."

• free textbooks useless without problem sets (Score:2)

  by Aeron65432 (805385) <agiamba.gmail@com> on Saturday April 26, @03:28PM (#23208460) Homepage
  Free textbooks are great and all if you want to learn the subject, like Yale/Harvard's free classroom recordings. But if you're taking a class at a university, most of the time these aren't going to be useful. Economics, engineering, calculus, all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book. I bought one edition earlier than the one recommended for my economics class and I've had to borrow my friends text to do all the work. Great idea, but I don't see it being useful unless you can somehow get all the college professors to start adopting them/copy the homework separately. (Given that a lot of books are written by the professors themselves, they are unlikely to drop a major revenue stream)

Thank F'n God! It's about time! (Score:2, Interesting)

by iamsamed (1276082) on Saturday April 26, @03:31PM (#23208484)

What irritated me most in College and especially 'B' school was that these textbooks would run for $80-$130 a piece (and many were soft cover!) and the exact same material was available in some layman's book for under $50. AND, the next Semester rolls around and guess what? Yep, the instructor is using the "new" edition and you have to buy the "new" edition. It was usually a new cover and higher price...that's about it.

Now, someone once argued with me that information changes and you need to have the latest info. Well, I replied, there's several years lead time from writing to publishing a text and therefore, it's out of date before it's published. And besides, tell me what advances in business that are occurring that requires those in B-school to have the "latest" info? Hmmm? (Even in the group psychology class where you'd think with the social sciences improving there'd would be a need for up to date info. Nope. I had to buy a $120 paperback that told us about Myers-Briggs and when you had a problem with an employee, the correct answer for everything was send him to "sensitivity training". I'm not fucking kidding.) If you have to teach the latest info, then you shouldn't use textbooks.

• Here are my suggestions (Score:3, Interesting)

  by line-bundle (235965) on Saturday April 26, @03:44PM (#23208558) Homepage Journal

  One of the reasons textbooks cost so much is because professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book.
  
  Also I am not too keen on the lower cost electronic versions of the books unless the publishers are monitored carefully. The electronic editions I have seen cost slightly less than the paper edition, and expire after 6 months. Students then are poorer as a result.

[Jan 8, 2008] MIT's OpenCourseWare Model is Proliferating Online

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare effort has been offering free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses per its website. Some of their courses offer a substantial amount of video and audio content. I remember stumbling across this resource via my employer's intranet about a year ago. Frankly speaking, I didn't think the concept would go very far because you couldn’t earn credit…

Well, I was wrong. It’s catching fire and over 100 universities worldwide have setup similar models and some are top tier schools such as Johns Hopkins and Tufts.

I was searching for a good UNIX course but I haven't found one yet. Surprisingly, it appears MIT’s Linear Algebra course is quite popular with the OpenCourseWare community.

By the way, I don't have any affiliation with OCW or any of the higher learning institutions mentioned.
 

Added later:

UC Irvine OCW
Notre Dame OCW
Utah State OCW
Osaka OCW
Japan OCW Consortium

Google Book Search

[Nov 28,2007] Digital Library Surpasses 1 Million Book Goal LiveScience

One and a half million books in more than 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, and various Indian languages, are now accessible via a single Web portal.

[Feb 9, 2007] http://e-library.net/

Welcome to the eLibrary - Open Ebooks Directory.

We are directory of most ebooks, sold in the Internet.
You can quickly find the ebook of your interest on this site, read a review, made by those, who have read the ebook.

Clicking to "visit" you'll move to the sellers (or the author's) site. There you'll be able to buy the ebook or ask the questions on the contents of the ebook.

We invite you to make a review of the ebook you have read for other people to get to know your opinion and make the right choice.

Ebooks readers:
- You can search and view the description of our eBooks in just a few seconds.
- Feel free to browse thousands of eBooks in 58 categories.
- We offer 270+ free eBooks! Or Link to eLibrary and Get 'The eLibrary Package' for Free! 1000+ ebooks and articles!
- You can view a current list of the Top Rated eBooks.
- You can view most popular eBooks.
- You can vote for any eBook.

Ebooks authors and publishers:
- You can add your Ebooks to our eLibrary for free.
- You can modify your listing anytime.
- Generate and place rating form to your site

[Jan 17, 2007] HK University Theses Online

The Hong Kong University Theses Collection holds 15,031 titles of theses and dissertations submitted for higher degrees to the University of Hong Kong since 1941. The first recorded thesis was dated 1928, though all theses prior to 1941 were lost during the occupation of WWII. HKUTO includes works in the arts, humanities, education and the social, medical and natural sciences. Many of them deal entirely with or focus on subjects relating to Hong Kong. The collection is primarily in English, with some in English and Chinese, and others in Chinese only. Almost all HKU theses are included in HKUTO. Missing ones might be located in HKU departmental libraries. HKUTO now includes 12,248 fulltext electronic theses.

[Oct 20, 2006] Slashdot Charles Darwin Online

eldavojohn writes "The entire works of Charles Darwin have been made available online. It includes scanned works that were owned by his family — many of which were signed by the author. The University of Cambridge hopes to have this completed by 2009 and is only estimated to be about half way done. If you have any love for books whatsoever, I suggest you take a look at how they present the user with each book. Take the very first edition of On the Origin of Species, for example, where they use frames to display the text on the left with the original image on the right. From the Reuters article: 'Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.'"

[May 8, 2006] NYT/Some Publishers of Scholarly Journals Dislike Bill to Require Online Access to Articles - New York Times By SARA IVRY

[Apr 27, 2006] LWN Learning the lesson open content licensing  This article was contributed by Glyn Moody

As the previous feature on open content noted, the need for an appropriate license was felt from the earliest days. Strangely, it was not Richard Stallman who filled this gap: even though the GNU General Public License dates back to 1984, it was only in 2000 that the corresponding GNU Free Documentation License was created. As a result, the honor for the creation of the first formal non-software open license goes to David Wiley.

In the summer of 1998, Wiley had joined the graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, where he began doctoral work on “learning objects” - small-scale, reusable computer-based educational materials designed to be used in a variety of settings. This was just a couple of months after the term “open source” had been devised at the Freeware Summit, and Wiley realized that what was needed was a kind of open source for instructional content.

He contacted people like Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond to ask their advice, and drew up his first license in July 1998. Wiley decided to call his approach “open content” - a term which he seems to have been the first to use consistently. For Stallman, the idea of “open” as opposed to “free” is anathema, and he also refuses to refer to works as “content”, so ultimately he wanted nothing to do with this new “OpenContent License”, even though he and Wiley had previously worked together in an attempt to tweak the GNU GPL for content. Raymond, by contrast, was an important influence on the fledgling open content idea, as the following passage from the newly-created Opencontent.org site indicates:

OpenContent advocates adoption of the principles Eric S. Raymond outlines in his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” for use in the development of Content. ... The Bazaar model for Content development will bring these same benefits to online instructional content; namely the creativity, expertise, and problem-solving power of a potentially infinite team of instructional designers and subject matter experts. A development effort of this kind will fill the Internet with high quality, well-maintained, frequently updated Content.

More input was provided by Tim O'Reilly and Andy Oram, making the license more palatable to publishers so that online versions of printed books and journals could be distributed for free. The result was the Open Publication License (OPL), released in June 1999. Appropriately enough, Raymond's “Cathedral and the Bazaar” was released under the OPL (as was his “Brief History of Hackerdom”). A number of other books, mostly in the field of computing, adopted the license, including GTK+/Gnome Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and Grokking the GIMP, by Carey Bunks. It was also adopted for Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, published by Prentice Hall.

Although the OPL led to a modest increase in open content being made available, the license still had some problems. One was that it came in four versions – OPL, OPL-A, OPL-B and OPL-AB - according to which, if any, of two optional clauses were included. These dealt with the thorny issues of “substantively modified works” and whether the work or derivatives of it could be published in book form for commercial purposes. The combinations obviously made it harder to be sure what exactly an OPL license permitted, and meant that users were forced to refer to the license to find out what their rights were. What was needed was some legal input to produce a series of open content licenses that clearly delineated what could and could not be done with them.

Fortunately, in the second half of the 1990s, a group of lawyers were becoming increasingly interested in the interrelated issues of copyright, intellectual property, digital content and the public domain. Pioneers here include Pamela Samuelson, James Boyle and Yochai Benkler. But the person who has become most closely associated with this whole area is undoubtedly Larry Lessig.

He rose to prominence with his book “Code and other laws of Cyberspace”, which asserted that the Net's software codes necessarily implied legal codes. From this early interest in architectures and their growing power to affect everyday life, Lessig's focus gradually shifted back to the legal domain, where he sought to counter the threats posed by the music and film industries to the new creative possibilities opened up by the Net.

His first attempt at a solution was the creation of Copyright's Commons in 1999, “a coalition devoted to promoting the public availability of literature, art, music, and film.” Its principal instrument was the use of what it called “counter-copyright”, which “strips away the exclusivity that a copyright provides and allows others to use your work as a source or a foundation for their own creative ideas. The counter-copyright initiative is analogous to the idea of open source in the software context.”

When Copyright's Commons became involved in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft lawsuit – which tried to block the extension of US copyright by 20 years - it also pioneered what it called “openlaw”, where legal arguments were posted online for open discussion.

It was Lessig who argued the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case in court – and lost, much to his chagrin. A more positive outcome from this work was the creation of a second, more ambitious, organization called Creative Commons, and the drawing up of a series of formal open content licenses. Like Wiley's Open Publication license, these Creative Commons licenses allow several options. While this lends them great flexibility, it also means that there is now a confusing array of Creative Commons licenses. Indeed, Richard Stallman no longer supports the Creative Commons project because not all of these licenses meet his requirements for freedom.

Despite Stallman's concerns, there is no doubt that the Creative Commons licenses have transformed the open content scene. They offer creators a range of rigorous licenses that have been drawn up by lawyers with a deep understanding of the issues of copyright in the Net age. An important recent court case in the Netherlands has confirmed their legality, at least in that jurisdiction.

Wiley's original licenses were created for educational materials, and among the first applications of the Creative Commons licenses were two major open content projects in the field of what has come to be called open courseware, both funded by the Hewlett Foundation. Just as open source avoids re-inventing the wheel by building on existing code, so open courseware aims to save time, effort and money by making educational material freely available for others to re-use, extend and improve.

The first such project, Connexions, came from Rice University. It was the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering, who was directly inspired by the example of open source. Connexions uses a content creation platform called Rhaptos, which is released under the GNU GPL. The other major open courseware project came from MIT. One of the people behind the OpenCourseWare idea – which arose out of an earlier failed attempt to make money from selling MIT courses online – was Hal Abelson, who is also one of the founders of Creative Commons. This joint involvement simplified the issue of licensing, something that was a major issue for Rice initially, until it too adopted a Creative Commons license.

MIT does not use an open source platform, but David Wiley has started a project called eduCommons, based on Plone, that offers this facility. Another of his free software projects, called Open Learning Support, and now part of eduCommons, provides Rice's Connexions and MIT's OpenCourseWare with online discussion boards. Baraniuk, for his part, is working on a range of ancillary open source software, including systems to aid translation, and a rating system for courses. It is also worth mentioning the free software course management package Moodle, which is widely used around the world, and Sakai, a similar project, funded by the Hewlett Foundation.

Although both Connexions and OpenCourseWare allow course materials to be modified, they do not make any provision in their platforms for true collaborative development. The final article in this short series will explore how this issue has been addressed by open content projects.

Glyn Moody writes about open source and open content at opendotdotdot.

Posted Apr 27, 2006 6:42 UTC (Thu) by subscriber tzafrir [Link]

> [...] there is no doubt that the Creative Commons licenses
> have transformed the open content scene. They offer
> creators a range of rigorous licenses that have been
> drawn up by lawyers with a deep understanding of the
> issues of copyright in the Net age.
 

Despite them being drawn up by experienced lawyers, and despite the several versions the CC licenses had so far, they still seem fail to apply to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The GFDL has basically the same problem, basically. Some of the issues involved seem to be quite practical (e.g: too strict anti-DRM clauses may cause problems when storing the file in an encrypted filesystem).
 

Version 2.0 of basically all the CC licenses share those problems. See http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary . That link seems to sum the discussions of the debian-legal mailing list from April 2004.

I can't find any later source, though the wordings of the relevant clauses in 2.5 has practically remained the same. Other people I have asked seem to believe that those issues still stand. But IANAL and probably non of them is either.

Any newer and more authorative opinions?

open content licensing and the DFSG Posted Apr 27, 2006 15:47 UTC (Thu) by subscriber smoogen [Link]

I doubt they have changed. At this point, I think the Debian people need to come out with a license that meets their needs and that writers can then follow.
Freedoms of users of works

Posted Apr 27, 2006 23:13 UTC (Thu) by subscriber bignose [Link]

Part of the problem seems to be that artistic or informative works are many years behind the "mind share" of required freedoms that programs currently enjoy. It's no longer the case with program authors that they find the ideas of the GPL to be foreign, but this is commonly the case with other types of works.

Authors seem to seek the CC licenses that prevent commercial redistribution, or prevent derivative works. Musicians seem more enlightened about derivative works, but still commonly want to prevent commercial redistribution. Artists of graphical works are commonly not prepared to share the "source" of the graphical work, so that others can work with it.

This is very similar to the mental landscape faced by free software twenty years ago. A core group was trying to educate copyright holders of the benefits to giving users of their programs the four freedoms iterated by the FSF. It took much patience and much working against deep-seated fallacies to bring the majority to the view that at least it's not *crazy* to give up so much control, even if one doesn't choose to do so oneself.

Sadly, the FSF seem to be themselves stuck near the beginning of this curve; they espouse the view that users of some kinds of useful information (programs) are more deserving of freedom than users of other kinds (e.g. books), with the result that they promote a license for books that is more restrictive to its recipients than the license they promote for programs.
 

It seems artists of works of authorship, graphical, audio, and other creative works need to go through a similar education period as software authors have been through.

Posted Apr 27, 2006 20:50 UTC (Thu) by subscriber k-squire [Link]

If you're interested, you can check out a recent Google Tech Talk presentation presented by the Connexions people.

I recently saw this presentation elsewhere, and was quite impressed. They have gotten to the point where they can take online texbook-quality material and produce a bound copy for a fraction of what textbooks cost today.

Their content coverage is a little uneven--lots of Electrical Engineering, Bioinformatics, and Music, little Computer Science. But there's quite a bit there, almost a critical mass in some areas. Good stuff!

Kevin

SAN FRANCISCO -- Search is on a mission these days.

It's no longer enough to be able to index and point to everything that's loaded on a Web server somewhere. Search has moved into a new era in which content owners and search providers are hustling to digitize information moldering on the shelf.

"The World Wide Web gives us access to more information, but almost everything on the net has been written since 1996," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. "I think folks before 1996 also had something to say."

Kahle spoke to an audience of librarians and journalists for the kick-off of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group with a plan to scan as many out-of-print books as possible, then work up the chain toward books under copyright. The OCA was announced on October 3.

The digitized books will be made openly available for search on the Internet Archive Web site or through other search services.

"Having an open library allows different projects to build new and different interfaces without having to ask permission," Kahle said.

The archive created an elegant reading interface that uses a page-turning metaphor. Entering a term in the search query box produces a yellow tab on each page on which the term is found. Clicking on a tab takes the user to that page, where the term is highlighted in yellow.

At the event, held in San Francisco's Presidio, Kahle's staff demonstrated the "scribe station," a system for scanning books that he said would cost around ten cents a page. The system uses a 16-megapixel digital camera that produces images at 500 DPI. Software color corrects the images and provides thumbnails so the operator can make sure all of the pages have been scanned.

The OCA has more software to help determine whether a particular book might be under copyright, and if so, to connect with another database created in partnership with libraries to find the copyright holder. "Copyright issues are tricky, but they're doable," Kahle said.

Rather than shipping books to a central location for scanning by a single company, OCA members will for the most part handle their own scanning, then upload the digitized documents to the archive.

OCA membership includes prestigious libraries and research institutions that have pledged to digitize priceless collections and make them available for search.

For example, the Smithsonian Institution will contribute its current digital collection and work to digitize materials with a focus on history, culture and biodiversity. The Missouri Botanicals Garden will scan rare botanical prints and books kept under lock and key in its archives. The Natural History Museum of London, the New York Botanical Garden and Royal Botanical Garden of London will contribute materials, as will the libraries of Columbia, Emory and Johns Hopkins Universities.

While Yahoo was a founding member of the OCA, and MSN announced its membership at the event, Google (Quote) was conspicuously absent. Google is being sued by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild for scanning library books without the consent of their copyright holders. (Google says its activities fall under fair use principles.)

Founding OCA members are The Internet Archive, Yahoo! Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., the European Archive, HP Labs, the National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media Inc., Prelinger Archives, the University of California, and the University of Toronto. Fourteen new members were announced at the event.

Several new OCA members said they wanted to make sure that these public troves of knowledge remained owned by the public.

Daniel Greenstein, executive director of the University of California's California Digital Library, said, "We want to make sure these works don't become commodified."

Doron Weber, director of the Sloan Foundation's programs for public understanding of science and technology and history of science and technology, said, "We cannot risk having world knowledge privatized. We believe an open, non-proprietary approach is better. To private companies, we say, 'Rein in your impulses.'"

[Oct 26, 2005] Roget's Thesaurus - As distributed by Project Gutenberg

Classic E-text of Roget's Thesaurus No. Two, which is derived from the version of Roget's Thesaurus published in 1911.asadz.com/thesaurus/

[Oct 26, 2005] Microsoft to start online book searches - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. is diving into the business of offering online searches of books and other writings, and says its approach aims to avoid the legal tussles met by rival Google Inc.

The Redmond-based software giant said Tuesday that it will sidestep hot-button copyright issues for now by initially focusing mainly on books, academic materials and other publications that are in the public domain.

Microsoft plans to initially work with an industry organization called the Open Content Alliance to let users search about 150,000 pieces of published material. A test version of the product is promised for next year.

The alliance, whose participants also include top Internet portal Yahoo Inc., is working to make books and other offline content available online without raising the ire of publishers and authors.

Danielle Tiedt, a general manager of search content acquisition with Microsoft's MSN online unit, said the company also is working with publishers and libraries on ways to eventually make more copyright material available for online searches.

She said Microsoft is looking at several options, including models where users would be charged to access the content.

Microsoft said it has no plans right now to have targeted ads located in the search results, but the company cautioned that it was still working out the details of its business model.  "I think about the 150,000 books as a test," Tiedt said.

(MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

Rival Google has taken a markedly different approach, with plans to index millions of copyright books from three major university libraries — Harvard, Stanford and Michigan — unless the copyright holder notifies the company which volumes should be excluded.

The Association of American Publishers, representing five publishers, and The Authors Guild, which includes about 8,000 writers, have both sued the search engine giant over the plans.

Google has defended the effort as necessary to its goal of helping people find information — and insists that its scanning effort is protected under fair use law because of restrictions placed on how much of any single book could be read.

Responding to Microsoft's plans to offer its own book search, Google said in a statement that it "welcomes efforts to make information accessible to the world."

Tiedt said Microsoft is coming at book search from a different angle in part because the software maker itself is so often the target of copyright infringement.  Pirated versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system are widely available in developing countries for only a few dollars.

Microsoft's approach has the potential to backfire, however, if Google ends up having more content available or begins offering ways to search content for free while Microsoft pursues a model that requires people to pay for it.

Microsoft acknowledges it is far behind Google.  Tiedt said she expects it will take years — and require a substantial investment — to solidify the MSN product, working out all the complex issues around searching through books and other materials online.

"This is not a money-maker for the company," Tiedt said.  "This is very much a strategic bet for search overall."

The effort marks Microsoft's latest effort to play catch-up with Google on various search technologies ranging from basic Internet search to localized queries.

But Google remains by the search leader by far, accounting for 45.1 percent of all U.S. Internet searches in September, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings.  Microsoft's MSN Search ranked third, accounting for 11.7 percent of U.S. searches during the same period.

eSchool News online - Yahoo to upstage Google's library plans

Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. is setting out to build a vast online library of copyrighted books that pleases publishers--something rival Google Inc. hasn't been able to achieve.

The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video, and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search content.

Other participants in the alliance, which was announced Oct. 3, include Adobe Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., the Internet Archive, O'Reilly Media Inc., the University of California, and the University of Toronto.

Although Yahoo will power the search engine, located at the Open Content Alliance web site, all of its content reportedly will be made available so it can be indexed by other major search engines, too, including Google's.

By joining the project, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo is hoping to upstage Google, which has a one-year head start on scanning and indexing books so more literature and academic research can be accessed with an internet connection from anywhere in the world.

"My feeling is we are doing something new here," Mandelbrot said. "We are building a collaborative effort that will make a great deal of copyrighted material available in a way that's acceptable to the creators. That is novel."

The alliance won't include any copyrighted material unless it receives the explicit permission of a publisher or author. That restriction means the alliance is bound to be missing much of the material available in brick-and-mortar libraries.

In an effort to be as comprehensive as possible, Google plans to index millions of copyrighted books from three major university libraries--Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan--unless the copyright holder notifies the company by Nov. 1 about which volumes should be excluded from the search engine index.

Google's opt out provision has outraged many publishers, who contend the company is flouting long-established copyright laws. The Author's Guild Inc., which represents about 8,000 writers, sued Google for copyright infringement last month (see "Authors: Google infringing on copyrights"). Google maintains its scanning represents "fair use" allowed under the law because it allows web surfers to view only excerpts from copyrighted books.

Some of the most strident critics of Google's library project are endorsing the Open Content Alliance, or OCA.

Patricia Schroeder, president for the Association of American Publishers, described the alliance's approach as "very encouraging."

Sally Morris, chief executive for the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, said she hopes Google follows the alliance's example. "The OCA's model of allowing rights holders to control which of their works are opened up ... and where they are hosted may encourage others to do so."

Google also applauded the Yahoo-backed alliance. "We welcome efforts to make information accessible to the world," the company said.

[Jun 30, 2005] Something fishy with Google library project

Everyman  

Join Date: Jun 2004, Posts: 115

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Something fishy with Google library project

---

Something fishy is going on.

In the NYT on December 14, 2004, "Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database," by John Markoff and Edward Wyatt:

"Each agreement with a library is slightly different. Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford's collection and the seven million at Michigan."
...
"At Stanford, Google hopes to be able to scan 50,000 pages a day within the month, eventually doubling that rate, according to a person involved in the project."
____________

50,000 pages a day is 2,083 pages per hour.

Let's double this rate, as Google will do "eventually," and call it 4,167 pages per hour. How many years will it take to do 8 million x 200 pages per volume?

8 million x 200 = 1,600,000,000 pages to be scanned.

1,600,000,000 / 4,167 = 383,969 hours to scan Stanford's library at the speed they hope to attain "eventually."

Let's run 24-hours a day (three shifts of temp workers at minimum wage!) and assume that the wizards at the Googleplex will never have any down time. How many days is this? 383,969 / 24 = 15,999 days.

How many years is this? 15,999 / 365.25 = 43.8 years. Even their cookie won't last that long!
________________

But there's another army of temp workers at Michigan. Let's look at the Michigan figures. According to University of Michigan librarian John Wilkin, as reported in the Detroit Free Press on December 14 by columnist Mike Wendland:

7,000,000: Volumes in the U-M library to be digitized.
2,380,000,000: Estimated number of pages.

Hold it right there, Mr. Librarian! Are you saying that each volume has an average of 340 pages? Well okay, you're the librarian!

I have to adjust my Stanford figures. I assumed 200 pages per volume for 8 million volumes. If it's really 340 pages per volume, then the Stanford project will take 1.7 times longer. Instead of 43.8 years, Stanford will take 74.46 years! (Two back-to-back cookies are needed!)

Then Mr. Wilkin goes on to say, "Going as fast as we can with the traditional means of doing this, it would take us about 1,600 years to do all 7 million volumes," he said. "Google will do it in six years."

Wow, I'm impressed. Google really is God. What's the scan rate for 7 million volumes over 6 years, if you run around the clock?

7 million x 340 pages per volume = 2,380,000,000 pages
6 years = 365.25 x 24 x 6 = 52,596 hours
scan rate = 2,380,000,000 / 52,596 = 45,251 per hour

For 24 hours, that comes to 1,086,024 pages per day. Now remember at Stanford, Google will "eventually" double the rate of 50,000 per day, which means 100,000 per day when they do this. Recall from above that this means 4,167 pages per hour.

In other words, even running full-speed 24 hours per day, the scan rate Google will have to achieve at Michigan in order to pull it off in six years, is 10.86 times greater than the rate they will "eventually" achieve at Stanford.

But of course, the Mike Wendland column also says this:

"The size of the U-M undertaking is staggering. It involves the use of new technology developed by Google that greatly speeds the digitizing process. Without that technology -- which Google won't discuss in detail -- the task would be impossible, says John Wilkin, the U-M associate librarian who is heading the project."

Wait a minute, the NYT piece said this:

"At least initially, Google's digitizing task will be labor intensive, with people placing the books and documents on sophisticated scanners whose high-resolution cameras capture an image of each page and convert it to a digital file."
...
"The company refused to comment on the technology that it was using to digitize books, except to say that it was nondestructive. But according to a person who has been briefed on the project, Google's technology is more labor-intensive than systems that are already commercially available."

So their secret sauce isn't even ready for tasting! Better hurry, the clock is ticking....

Is it possible that the NYT piece dropped a zero and the rate is really ten times the figure they reported? I doubt it, from what I know about the technology. If anyone thinks this is possible, the NYT will probably be happy to check out their source again and run a correction if they goofed.

[Aug 12, 2005] Google pauses library project CNET News.com

update Google will temporarily stop scanning copyright-protected books from libraries into its database, the company said late Thursday.

The company's library project, launched in December, involves the scanning of out-of-print and copyright works so that their text can be found through the search engine's database. Google is working on the project with libraries at Stanford University, Harvard University and other schools.

The plan has come under fire from several groups, including publishers, who object to what they claim are violations of their copyrights.

Google said on its blog late Thursday that, following discussions with "publishers, publishing industry organizations and authors," it will stop scanning in copyright-protected until November, while it makes changes to its Google Print Publisher Program.

The publisher program also involves scanning copyright books. In that program, books are scanned--at the publisher's request--to let Web searchers view excerpts from books, critics' reviews and other book data, with links back to publishers' Web sites or other places where the books are for sale.

Google said it is adding new features that will let publishers submit a list of books that, when scanned through the library project, will be added to the publisher program. It is also adding a feature that lets publishers present a list of books that should not be scanned through the library project.

"We think most publishers and authors will choose to participate in the publisher program in order (to) introduce their work to countless readers around the world. But we know that not everyone agrees, and we want to do our best to respect their views too," Google said on its blog.

Google was not immediately available for comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)

But Google's move apparently did not satisfy all publishers' concerns regarding the project.

"Google's procedure shifts the responsibility for preventing infringement to the copyright owner rather than the user, turning every principle of copyright law on its ear," Patricia Schroeder, CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

"Many AAP members have partnered with Google in its Print for Publishers Program, allowing selected titles to be digitized and searchable on a limited basis pursuant to licenses or permission from publishers," she said. "We were confident that by working together, Google and publishers could have produced a system that would work for everyone, and regret that Google has decided not to work with us on our alternative proposal

[Jun 17, 2005] Google Library Peril For Publishers ? By Susan Kuchinskas

Google is digitizing entire university libraries. Book publishers haven't decided if the Google Library Project means exposure to new readers or copyright infringement on a massive scale. It's a question the Supreme Court may have to decide.

In October, the search goliath announced Google Print, a program that lets publishers work with Google to digitize books to which they hold the rights in order to make them available for search. Google promises publishers they can earn money when searchers click on contextual ads that appear alongside the book pages.

But book publishers were taken aback when they heard about Google Library, a project that had been under way since 2002 with the University of Michigan. Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University and the New York Public Library also are in the process of letting Google scan parts or all of their collections.

Google broke the news in December, the same day print.google.com officially went live. The Library Project was positioned as an extension of Google Print, but some publishers saw it as more of a collision with it.

Deals with Google were struck one publisher at a time, but they included restrictions on the amount of material from a work under copyright that Google could show in search results, maintaining a fair-use argument for the search engine's use. When searchers click on a listing, they might be able to read anywhere from several pages to only a few sentences containing the keywords. Listings also include a shot of the book cover, links to online booksellers and ads.

But if Google copies a library book instead of making a deal with the publisher of that book, it's likely the publisher would be cut out of any ad revenue share. Google could not make executives available for interviews, but John Wilkin, associate librarian for the University of Michigan and head of its Google Library Project, said his library had no agreement to share ad revenue with Google.

In other words, all the ad money would stay in Google's pocket.

"Having reached these agreements with publishers for the use of books under their copyright, Google now announced they'd scan works from several libraries -- including works that are currently under copyright -- without requesting the permission of the copyright owners," said Allan Adler, vice president for legal affairs for the Association of American Publishers (AAP). "Imagine the consternation that caused among publishing houses who realized the possibility that books they had agreed to provide to Google under contract might nevertheless be scanned by Google without those agreements."

Adler said AAP members were wondering why Google had sat down with them, then announced two months later that it didn't really need publishers' permission to scan.

"Google has said publishers can opt out works from the Library Project," Adler said, "but we understand that to mean not that Google wouldn't scan them in their entirety and include them in its database, but only that they wouldn't use part of the works in response to a search query."

The librarians saw the project as a way to make their collections more accessible to a digital-centric public. They also were lured by Google's offer to give them their own digital copy of each book. Universities around the world have begun their own digitization projects, but Google's muscle and money could put those projects on Internet time.

University of Michigan's Wilkin said, "We had focused on the hard 10 percent of the problem. Google swooped in and did the easy 90 percent."

While Google will only make snippets of the libraries' copyrighted works available through search, the University of Michigan plans to make entire digital copies of works not under copyright available to library users.

Google and the libraries insist they're respecting copyright and acting inside the law. Said Wilkin, "For everything for which there are no rights issues, such as pre-1923 works and U.S. government publications, we'll allow multiple online users to access our copies at once. But for works under copyright, we're not going to be able to provide full digital access for even our own users."

The AAP's Adler said the publishing community wasn't focusing on the murky fair use question, but rather on Google's plan to make money from books it hadn't bought.

"Google's use of these copyrighted works in order to expand the kinds of responses it offers to users of its search engine is clearly going to be used to enhance its ability to sell advertising in conjunction with the operation of that search engine," Adler said.

The American Association of University Presses (AAUP) sent a critical letter to Google, complaining that Google Library could cut into the presses' earnings. According to the AAUP, on average, university presses recover 87 percent of the cost of publishing scholarly books from sales, with payments for permission to reproduce works in such things as anthologies, paperback editions, course packs, electronic reserves and document delivery services adding to that take.

The AAUP came in for its own share of criticism for not consulting with all its members before firing off the letter -- and for providing a copy of the letter to BusinessWeek before Google had received it. Peter Givler, the AAUP's executive director and the author of the letter, didn't respond to requests for comment.

John Wiley & Sons was one publisher that went directly to Google. "We see potential issues and potential opportunities that could have an impact on our authors, customers and the business," said Susan Spilka, Wiley's director of communications. "Were' talking to them directly and also through our trade association."

She said Wiley is in the process of learning more about the Google Print for libraries program and exploring both the issues and the opportunities.

The crux of the copyright issue, according to Adler, is not whether supplying anywhere from a few sentences to a few pages of a book to searchers is covered by the admittedly murky fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Rather, the Library Project seems like a way for Google to profit off books without buying them.

A court date is likely, said Lee Bromberg, a partner in Bromberg & Sunstein, a law firm specializing in intellectual property. The key question, he said, is whether the issue is more like Sony versus Universal City Studios (1984) or like Basic Books versus Kinkos (1991).

In other words, is Google like Sony, providing technology that might be used to infringe copyright but which also has substantial non-infringing uses? Or is it more like Kinkos? In that case, the courts decided that Kinkos violated publishers' copyrights when it reproduced pages from their books and sold them as reading lists to university students -- with the intention of making a profit.

It's a great time to be a lawyer, in any case. Said Bromberg, "Technology seems to continually outpace the copyright law."

[May 24, 2005] Publishers protest Google library project - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

SAN FRANCISCO - A group of academic publishers called Google Inc.’s plan to scan millions of library books into its Internet search engine index a troubling financial threat to its membership.

The Association of American University Presses said in a letter to Google that the online search engine’s library project “appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale.”

The association, which represents 125 nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books, asked Google to respond to a list of 16 questions seeking more information about how the company plans to protect copyrights.

[Dec 27, 2004] Google’s Library Project Questions, Questions, Questions

— Librarians, academicians, journalists, information industry pundits, and real people continue to ring in with comments, concerns, quarrels, and commendations for Google’s new library program. “This is the day the world changes,” said John Wilkin, a University of Michigan librarian working with Google. “It will be disruptive because some people will worry that this is the beginning of the end of libraries. But this is something we have to do to revitalize the profession and make it more meaningful.” Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, told the Free Press: “This project signals an era when the printed record of civilization is accessible to every person in the world with Internet access. It is an initiative with tremendous impact today and endless future possibilities.” When asked whether Google is building the library to replace all other libraries, Google representatives—after saluting the role of librarians—said they had “no such plans at the moment. There was too much work to do.”

Here is a roundup of some of the questions asked and answers posited:

• Will the content Google derives from this library program become part of Google Scholar?
   
  • A Google representative had no answer at this time; however, he did say that it seemed “a natural intersection.”
     
• What will this cost Google?
   
  • Many questioned the technology and techniques it would require to perform the Herculean effort—and the costs entailed. Some observers conjectured that performing the project in a 6-year time frame would require an average scan rate of 3,200 volumes a day (365 days a year) for the University of Michigan’s 7 million volumes alone; others applied the same work schedule and came up with 2.25 books per minute. When asked about feasible costs for digitization (estimated by some at $10 per book), Gordon Macomber, president and CEO of Thomson Gale (which has extensive experience in digitizing its Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Nineteenth Century Collections Online licensed products), indicated that $10 per book was below Gale’s experienced cost. All agreed it was a huge undertaking.
     
• How will Google handle duplicates between the libraries?
   
  • Google staff had no answer. However, Jay Jordan, president and CEO of OCLC, pointed out that OCLC has a digital registry—available for a nominal fee—that lists what has been digitally preserved and what’s in the queue. The University of Michigan is reportedly harvesting catalog records for its content contributions.
     
• Is this project English-language only?
   
  • Michael Keller, Stanford’s library director and director of academic information resources, stated that Stanford planned to contribute non-English texts—in particular, European languages using Roman alphabet characters. But he pointed out that Google can process in other alphabets, e.g., Kanji or Arabic.
     
• What about archiving considerations? How durable will this electronic library be?
   
  • The participating libraries have announced robust efforts to protect the digital collection copies Google will return to them. The University of Michigan will store files on gold CD-ROMs with a stress-test life of 3 centuries. Stanford will keep at least three copies of magnetic tape cartridges that will be continually tested and maintained.
     
  • I did not ask, but I assume Google will protect its bread-and-butter content, especially content as expensive to acquire as this, with due diligence.
     
• What effect will this library-based digitization have on Google’s relationships with publishers? Is it designed to push publishers into joining the Google Print program?
   
  • Google representatives rejected any charges that this project was meant to hammer publishers into joining Google Print. However, they did point out: “[P]articipating in the original Google Print does offer significant benefits, namely by creating a book-selling link, using the publisher log, providing links back to the publisher’s Web site, and additional reporting. It also allows us to show more than just the snippet view, which can lead to greater purchase decisions.” Also, currently, books retrieved from the publisher contributions to Google Print do not have a “Find It in a Library” link as material from the scanned library collections does.
     
  • OCLC’s Jordan didn’t think Google had to “herd anyone” among the publishers. “With the exposure Google Print offers publishers, they can’t afford not to be there, because other publishers are. It’s the Chicken Little syndrome.”
     
  • Patricia Schroeder, executive director of the Association of American Publishers, commented on winners and losers as Google enters this field. She saw it as giving a “huge pump to print-on-demand” and said this development could “solve the returns problem. In fact, it could solve a lot of supply chain problems.” Building acceptance of reading electronic texts, she thought, would encourage book sales by lowering prices for e-books. But overall, Schroeder thought it would not threaten publishers. “At the end of the day, what we can produce is creative, and that’s harder than techies think it is. We will still need publisher staffs.” Schroeder considers reprint houses and libraries to be vulnerable, however.
     
• How might Google’s competitors, such as Yahoo! or Microsoft, respond to this challenge?
   
  • Unless someone can come up with a deal with the Library of Congress and/or The British Library, it’s hard to see how anyone could counter this massive infusion of content. Will large research libraries soon have Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on their doors? Perhaps. And not just those current competitors. What about Amazon, itself a digitizer of books for its “Search Inside the Book” program? After Google finishes its titanic project, it will have created—at the very least—earth’s largest out-of-print bookstore, a mammoth electronic re-issuance of copyrighted and non-copyrighted publications from publishers around the world. Permissions from publishers could clear the way for Google to enter the electronic bookselling arena in a big way. (Again, Google representatives had nothing to say about future marketing plans in this area.)
     
• What impact could this project have on current digitization projects?
   
  • One observer who runs a digital library project of 175,000 documents in approximately 10 million images commented that his and every other digital library project had now become “small-scale.” He considered that Google and its participating library partners had “broken through mental barriers of scale, technology, and copyright law. This rocks the world.” A representative of a leading research library consortium predicted that the new project could table or even kill current digitization projects at libraries, while the librarians waited tsee if their planned projects were necessary or, assuming their content was unique, if Google might someday digitize that content for free.
     
  • On the other hand, Marjorie Hlava of Access Innovations, a consulting and software house for library automation, considered the new program could only help them. With Google “lowering the bar” and simplifying digitization, she expected more people to get interested in such projects. She expected even more interest in Access’ software offerings to provide the needed precision through taxonomies, source coding, customization, etc.—the precision that Google lacks, according to Hlava.
     
  • Other ways to get online books clearly exist—ways that allow for downloading public domain books, e.g., Project Gutenberg, the Online Books Page from Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania, and even the “Million Book Project” between the Internet Archive, Carnegie Mellon University, the Library of Congress, and other libraries. Libraries can license book collections from fee-based services such as OCLC’s netLibrary, which has a public domain component, or ebrary’s fee-based library service. However, the most any of these projects—fee or free—currently offer is tens of thousands of books, not millions.
     
  • As for digitization projects produced and funded by library vendors, I asked several executives from among the database aggregators what impact they thought Google’s effort would have over time. The general public position seemed to follow the maxim of “a rising tide lifts all boats,” rather than the tsunami image. Macomber of Thomson Gale forecasts that sales would stay robust for the company’s public domain historical collections. “Anything and everything that draws the attention of people interested in scholarly reference content helps our business and that of other publishers of scholarly works. We’ve never had a time where scholarly content was in such a bright light. There’s opportunity there. It’s now a matter of realizing the greater demand and serving the greater market. The fact that it’s a smaller share, but of a much larger market, that’s the important change.” He also expected to win through providing added value, e.g., the Shakespeare Online spinoff of other digitization with multiple imaged versions of the plays, critical essays, biographical material, etc., all collected in one compact online product.
     
• Will librarians be threatened by the new development?
   
  • The Internet doesn’t scare Carol Brey-Casino, current president of the American Library Association. In a Wall Street Journal interview, she said: “We had this conversation when the Internet began to get popular, and what’s happened is that library visits have doubled in the last decade to 1.2 billion.” Consulting firm Outsell did point out (“Google to Digitize Library Book Holdings,” http://now.outsellinc.com/now/2004/12/google_t_digit.html) that, despite the efforts of “consortia and library groups that have been working on digitization issues in libraries for years … it took an outsider third party, Google, to pull this off.” While admitting that the possession of vast financial resources enabled Google to take on such a task, Outsell also attributed the development to the fact that “Google is the only player with the audacity to act on the grand vision … it took an outsider to really go after the content buried in books.” Outsell does not think the development will destroy libraries as we know them. In fact, the company’s leaders think that process is already well under way, and they welcome the change. “This isn’t a death knell for libraries; it’s another shove to get librarians out from behind the stacks and harness their expertise, including subject-matter expertise, and to enhance users’ ability to find, use, and access information in any format. Getting out of the business of simply storing books should be a welcome goal.”
     
  • Google doesn’t scare Michael Gorman, dean of library services at California State University at Fresno and president-elect of the American Library Association. Gorman had almost nothing good to say about the Google library project in an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times (“Google and God’s Mind,” Dec. 17, 2004) and picked up by other newspapers. He starts off his piece referring to “the boogie-woogie Google boys” and goes on from there, concluding “that enormous databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms.” Gorman does state his approval of online access to reference material and digitization of unique manuscripts and images, although Google’s library partners do not make the latter material available for the project. (Other remarks in the piece seem to indicate that Gorman has not tested Google Print search results specifically.) Gorman says it is “premature to prepare to mourn the death of libraries and the death of the book…. This latest version of Google hype will no doubt join taking personal commuter helicopters to work and carrying the Library of Congress in a briefcase on microfilm as ‘back to the future’ failures, for the simple reason that they were solutions in search of a problem.” Instead, he suggests people should accustom themselves to a “short wait” for “the active and developed interlibrary lending system that supplies thousands of books daily to scholars, researchers, and dilettantes worldwide.” (I asked OCLC’s Jordan whether OCLC had plans in the works to make ILL delivery nationwide with a quick turnaround. He confirmed OCLC employees were working on the issues, but—at this point—they do not have a way for libraries to verify credit cards, which would seem a necessary, “deposit fund” precondition for any massive transfer of assets by the nation’s libraries.) By the way, a recent Library Journal story indicated that Gorman has “taken LIS education as the theme of his presidency.”
     
  • John Berry of Library Journal viewed the Google library program as “another great leap forward for access to information, a paradigm shift in our time.” As for the future of librarians, Berry said: “Every time anything like this comes even close, the role of librarians is strengthened and made more central. This will happen again. We’ll go back to our basics—evaluation and provision of information sources, helping people authenticate currency, comprehensiveness, accuracy, and so forth.”
     
  • Marjorie Hlava pointed out a practical consideration. “It costs $200 a square foot to maintain a library collection (heating, utilities, building costs, staff, etc.). If I had 132 miles of shelf space and someone offered to digitize half of it, I’d be real interested.” And, after the digitization, Hlava expected people would be tempted to downsize their physical collections. OCLC’s Jordan agreed. He expected the libraries in the program to “re-purpose” their funds, for example by building up their special collections.
     
  • Mary Case, library director at the University of Illinois at Chicago, cut to the chase: “If we dig in our heels, we’ll just look stupid. It’s coming. We must use it.”
     
• What’s next for Google? Are there any other prized content collections in its line of sight?
   
  • I asked Google representatives about other kinds of public domain books, e.g., “copyleft” (author’s permission granted in advance) or government documents, e.g., GPO Access content. They indicated that “all of that is on target. It’s a matter of prioritization.”
     
  • Other collections of material would seem tbe logical extensions to the library program, e.g., ProQuest’s compilation of a century or more of doctoral dissertations and masters’ theses. The Pennsylvania Library Association held an October debate on the relationship between libraries and Google at its annual conference (Brian Kenney, ed. “Googlizers vs. Resistors,” Library Journal, December 2004, pp. 44–46). At that panel session, Googlizer Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, described a test of putting 3,600 theses and dissertations online and into Google’s hands. In the first 3 years, users went from 50 to 500,000. I asked ProQuest’s Suzanne BeDell, vice president of higher education publishing (and a Resistor on the panel), and Mary Sauer-Games, director of publishing, whether ProQuest would consider opening up its collection to Google Print. Another branch of ProQuest is apparently in conversations with Google Print. BeDell said, “Any opportunity for us at ProQuest to help increase usage of data [that] librarians are already subscribing to—and Google can really help to do that as can any Web-based search tool—is a real opportunity.” She also reported that ProQuest has purchased and installed a new high-speed scanner for digitizing microform content. “Yes,” said BeDell, “Google is a disruptive technology. This Google project will fundamentally change what we do in our business, but, that being said, it’s a great opportunity. It’s bringing so much to the table in one fell swoop; the opportunities are outstanding.”
     

Etc

• MIT OpenCourseWare Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Fall 2002 Readings

• Get Content Creative Commons

• Connexions Repository Rice University's course material available for distribution and reuse Berklee Shares Music lessons from the premier institution for the study of contemporary music

• InstantBooks.com Instant Books Library

• The Bartleby Library -- A Web-based compendium of literary classics from Columbia University.

• WWW Virtual Library: Subject Index
  

Recommended Links

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In case of broken links please try to use Google search. If you find the page please notify us about new location

• List of digital library projects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Google Directory - Reference Libraries Library and Information Science
• Open Content Alliance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• www.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Open Books Project
• Safari  Joint venture of O'Reilly and the Pearson Technology Group. Safari Books Online sm is a successor to famous but abandoned MCP Personal bookshelf and now is subscription service ($9 a month).  All in all it is probably  one of the best non-free computer e-text site. Free registration and 14 days trial period.
• Computer Science Degrees & Resources Online
• MIT OpenCourseWare Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Fall 2002 Readings
• Free Computer and IT Books - p. 1 of 4 one of the best collection of links to free books
• The Linux Documentation Project Homepage
• The Linux Review Resources for Linux Users
• HELP-SITE -- over 800 free documents!
• Computer and Internet Books FREE OnLine Editions
• The On-Line Books Page

Computer Book Libraries

• www.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Open Books Project
• AllFreeTech E-Books - This site contains 62 programming books, 20 operating system books, and 10 application books, including the following: XML Complete, Red Hat Linux Unleashed, UNIX Unleashed, Internet Edition, and Teach Yourself Photoshop in 14 Days. (free registration required)
• Free Book Archive
• redhat.com Red Hat Manuals
• netLibrary - Home -- very good, but will be closed to individual subscribers in 2000
• ITLibrary -- search engine
• McGraw-Hill betabooks site -- good. Contains selected chapter of up to ten beta books
• IBM Redbooks - Home Page -- some redbooks are online and some are pretty decent
  • TCPIP Tutorial and Technical Overview
• Hewlett-Packard Technical Documentation
• http://www.digital.com  -- Digital Unix books online
• Programming, Software, Hardware information collection

• Myresearchinstitute.com - Certification braindumps and the following books are available for download: Learn Visual Basic 6 in 10 Weeks, Oracle Unleashed, Using Java Script, Java Script Manual of Style, Teach Yourself VB Script in 21 Days, Web Programming with Visual Basic.

  Unix, Linux, System Administration and Programming - Here are some of the free books here: Special Edition Using Java, Special Edition Using CGI, CGI Developer's Guide, HTML 4.0 Specification, Unix Unleashed, Platinum Edition Using Visual Basic 5, Visual C++ in 12 Easy Lessons

  PocketPCpress - Free eBooks for Microsoft Reader - download these free ebooks: Perl Quick Reference, Fuzzy Systems - A Tutorial, C++ Operator Precedence. (You'll need Microsoft Reader for desktop and laptop computers.)

Free Online Books from InformIT.com - These are the complete books, not just the short, beginning paragraphs from Safari. Here they are:
- High Performance Networking Unleashed
- Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 14 Days, Second Edition
- Using Oracle8
- Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days, Second Edition
- Web Programming with Perl 5
- Java 1.1 Unleashed, Third Edition
- Special Edition Using HTML 4, 4TH Edition
- Presenting C#
- Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript 1.1 in a Week, Second Edition
- Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ 6 in 21 Days
- Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, Second Edition
- Sams Teach Yourself C in 21 Days, Fourth Edition
- Using Visual Basic 6
- Red Hat Linux Unleashed

Etc

• Library - Center on Religion and Democracy -- some classic books in HTML
• Books On-line New Listings --   good, but mostly for non-computer oriented e-texts listings
• The New Zealand Digital Library -- search engines collection
• PROJECT GUTENBERG INDEX  -- big library of electronically stored books, mostly classics, that can be downloaded for free and viewed off-line.
• The ETEXT Archives --  mostly outdated
• Online Books FAQ -- mostly outdated
• B&R Samizdat Express Internet trends reading fiction etexts
• Alex A Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the Internet -- outdated, but contains some useful info
• Classic books online  --   Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and "reader's choice" Web sites. Mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation.
• Electronic Texts and Publishing (Library of Congress)
• The Internet Wiretap -- mostly outdated
• Directory of eBooks NonFiction Computer
• On-Line Literary Resources
• Cornell Digital Library Math Collection
• Mark Twain Online Texts