Comments on: Google’s digitizing 10M books a year, says the Economist—so what does this mean to the public domain community?

By: Garson O'Toole

Garson O'Toole — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:49:30 +0000

I have been using Google Book search to conduct a simple fun research project that I hope to write about on this blog. It is a remarkably powerful and useful tool and Google in my opinion deserves praise for building it and letting people use it without charge. Government and non-profit groups have so far spectacularly failed in constructing a comprehensive e-book library. (Certainly the Internet Archive, Distributed Proofreaders, Gutenberg and other groups also deserve praise.)

The Google tool has exasperating flaws as Google Doubter and Eric Wilson mention above. The database contains too many blurry unreadable scan images together with improperly cropped images and half-images. In addition there are sometimes fingers visible in scans and inaccurate optical character recognition (OCR) results. The snippets are too small and the graphical image companion for each snippet sometimes is cropped too tightly or shows the wrong text. (Google is under ferocious legal attack by publishers and author guilds and perhaps it has deliberately chosen a tiny snippet size.) The main problem hampering my research diversion is inaccurate/misleading publication dates.

By: Eric Wilson

Eric Wilson — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 16:34:14 +0000

Google Doubter makes an interesting point re: the scan quality…putting aside the fact the bloated file size is sometimes due to color reproductions of tan pages(!), some of the p.d. Google Books I tried reading were either missing pages or had them out of order. I still needed Project Gutenberg copies to be sure I got everything that was supposed to be there.

I’m a big booster for digital facsimiles of classic editions, so in that respect I don’t mind PDF so much, but Google Books has a bit of a way to go in the quality control department before they’re a proper threat.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:02:58 +0000

Thanks for your thoughts, Brian. Remember, Google is already watermarking public domain content with a corporate logo, and that just might be the opening for much more. I’m all in favor of all kinds of biz models, including Google’s. But I do worry about it preempting libraries and other institutions and Gutenberg-style groups in various respects. – David

By: Brian Carnell

Brian Carnell — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:44:08 +0000

I guess I’m missing something — why should I care if Google supplants PG and IA for putting public domain books online. They are still in the public domain, so nothing will prevent me from grabbing the book and making my own version or redistributing it in text form.

Now obviously if Google tries to assert some sort of ownership of derivatives of its public domain scans, that’s a problem, but assuming nothing like that happens and they don’t care if I grab the public domain PDF and do my own OCR and convert it to the ebook format flavor of the week, what’s the problem?

By: google doubter

google doubter — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:50:19 +0000

The Google books exercise is of enormous value for me but it is like searching a garbage can. The quality of Google books is appaling, OCR is no better and their policies to show you only snippets of books more then 100 years old that are no longer available in bookshops or libraries is very frustrating. What is more, the snippets are in at least 50 per cent not relevant to my search.
As an individual I can do much better scans/photos with OCR and indexing. Thanks and shame for Google.

By: SCWeaver

SCWeaver — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:44:31 +0000

David, regarding a previous post, the Internet Arichive has a scanned and ORC copy of “Free Air” available for download.