More on the book-scanning projects
Andreas von Bubnoff, The Real Death of Print, Nature, December 1, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). On the many current book-scanning projects. Excerpt:
[R]evolutions are rarely bloodless and this one could soon get ugly. In the United States authors and publishers are squaring up against Google for a legal fight over copyright. Opinion is divided over whether the scanning projects being implemented by companies such as Google and Amazon…will hand control of the world’s literature to private enterprise — and, if so, what this could mean. And with several independent scanning projects under way, it is still not clear how much of the information will be freely available, or where and how it can all be coordinated and accessed….Assets such as searchability have prompted the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, to get involved in an open-access enterprise called the Million Book Project. This is an international scanning effort with many participants, including Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since the project began in 2002, about 600,000 out-of-copyright books have been scanned, although only about half of them are currently available online. The scanning takes place in India and China, with books being shipped there temporarily from libraries around the world….[Amazon’s] ‘search inside the book’ feature increases sales by 8%, the company says. Scientific publishers, such as the US National Academies Press also see increased print sales when they allow their books to be viewed online….Google’s plan has shaken up the digitalbook world in other ways too [beyond triggering lawsuits]. For one thing, many believe that its size and resources mean Google can pull of this feat — so large-scale repositories of digital books seem a more realistic and immediate prospect than ever before. Google has also galvanized its competitors, both public and private (see graphic) to redouble their efforts, and has placed a question mark over the future of libraries and librarians. “I think Google is in a class by itself because of the quantity of money and the level of centralization,” says Daniel Greenstein, librarian of the California Digital Library in Oakland, California. “Google has paved the way, created the appetite for this kind of activity, and anxiety on the part of libraries and publishers.”…Another person to be energized, but also alarmed, by Google’s move is Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that archives web pages and other digital files. Although Google has never indicated that it plans to claim ownership over its digitized material or charge for search access, Kahle doesn’t want to leave digital books entirely in the hands of private enterprise. That’s why, in October, he announced the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). This aims to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content, which, as far as possible, will be freely accessible….But Matthias Ulmer, a German publisher who helped launch an e-book initiative by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, thinks that scanning old books is “a complete waste of money”. “Science is moving incredibly fast…,” says Ulmer. Earlier this year, his association announced an initiative whereby some 100 German publishers are considering digitizing about 100,000 newly published books by 2006. Publishers will take their own digital raw data and place them on a network of their own servers. Scientists and others will then be able to access the books for a fee.
