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‘Digitized by Google’: Corporate graffiti on public-domain classics—every page
August 30, 2006 | 7:45 pm
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By David Rothman
Amid all the elation over Google allowing PDF downloads, keep in mind that the company is watermarking its name on every public-domain page. Bleak House, shown here, is among the targets of this corporate graffiti.
I can understand Google claiming credit at the start of books and even requesting that its graphics remain there. But branding of every page is obnoxious. It just isn’t going to increase search engine business that much, or even grow brand awareness. Google, Google, Google—millions of people can’t avoid the name anyway when doing the usual searches. Furthermore, no anti-business sentiment at my end exists against Google. In fact, I’m a very small Google shareholder. What’s more, I believe in the usefulness of polite ads in appropriate copyrighted books, especially when there are ad-free alternatives; someone has to pay the publisher and author.
Best scenario: Vexed users–so the page-by-page branding stops
But in Google’s branding of the public domain, we’re talking about a rotten and even stupid business practices. Ideally, in fact, by intrusively branding the classics, the company will lose money by annoying users. The Do No Evil Boys are like little kids desecrating international monuments with spray cans. While Google’s public domain efforts are in many ways laudable, this page-by-page branding is Silicon Valley huckstery at its worst. If nothing else, maybe the Do No Evil duo can agree to confine watermarks to the starts of chapters.
Not the only company branding public domain books
Mind you, Google isn’t the only company slapping its name on public domain books, and in fact, I think it’s fine to put out highly branded collections—one way to make them pay off better than otherwise. Furthermore, I notice that my friends at PlanetPDF are branding pages other than the start of the book. Still, they aren’t putting their name every page, and they are adding plenty of value, such as by tagging their PDF for easier reading on PDAs. Google not!
Related: A CNET article with download instructions for Google classics. “Readers can find the books by choosing the ‘Full view books’ option on the Google Book Search home page before they activate their search. Once they have chosen a book from the results page, a download button is clearly visible on the top-right corner of the page.” Google Book Search is here.
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Comments:
“The Do No Evil Boys are like little kids desecrating international monuments with spray cans.”
Let’s get real here. Google is allowing us to download entire libraries, tens of thousands of books that we wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Their unobtrusive brand at the bottom is a small price to pay for this access. This is creation, not desecration.
Hey, Ryan, you’re entitled–thanks for your thoughts. I myself am afraid of Google preempting other, more user-friendly approaches such as that of the Open Content Alliance. – David
I have not heard about the Open Content Alliance before though I knew Yahoo wanted to do something about digitizing too. The one thing I like about Google though is that it really forced the issue by the digitization of everything copyrighted or not.
Now if someone would try and force the issue with an open format ebook file… Here I had high hopes for Amazon, and I think they are really missing a historic opportunity with their Mobipocket thing.
I have no affiliation with Google, do not own the stock, and for selfish (pi/2~1.57% rebates on all orders) reasons I use Amazon’s A9 engine (based on Google) for all my searches, but I think that digitization is going to be one of Google’s major achievements if only by energizing the debate so forcefully.
Liviu
I fail to see a problem, really. I checked one of their books myself—The Golden Triangle by Maurice Leblanc, an Arsène Lupin novel which I had not previously had the opportunity to read and had never been available elsewhere on-line—and found the branding completely unobtrusive. It didn’t obscure the reading of any of the text; to be honest I barely even noticed it.
It’s not all that different from a webcomic artist sticking the URL of his site at the bottom of every comic strip frame, so that if someone hot-links the image elsewhere without saying where it came from, they’ll get the credit for making it available that they deserve, and the viewer will know where to go if they want to find the rest of it.
I would rather like to be able to read the thing in HTML, though, rather than the original book page scans. Wonder what the chances of getting Distributed Proofing to add this book to their digitization list would be?
Chris, thanks for your thoughts. We’ll just agree to disagree over the branding issue (remember–in the future the branding could get more obnoxious). As for the Golden Triangle–hey, maybe Branko can pass the suggestion on to others at DP. Thanks. David