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Finger Spam in Google scanned books
September 21, 2009 | 3:13 pm
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By Paul Biba
As part of a longer article Self Publishing 2.0 takes a look at Google’s Finger Spam and discusses why it is important to get quality control right if Google, and self published books are to succeed:
I only downloaded one book from Google Books this year, and it included more than a half dozen such image errors which I’m going to call “finger spam.” Google has come to dominate the competitive business of Internet search in large part because of their ability to fight spam. If they are going to be successful making scanned books available on demand, they’re going to need to start fighting finger spam as well. My suggestion is that the Google Books department appoints Matt Cutts their new editor-in-chief.
Technorati Tags:
Google, Google Book Search, Paul Biba, publishing, self-publishing, TeleRead
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Comments:
I’ve run into this more than once, though I’m not sure I’d call it spam. Sometimes the page is rescanned, sometimes not. More frustrating are the blurry pages (usually a page caught in mid-turn) that aren’t rescanned.
At a guess, these ‘glitches’ happen more often in books that were scanned early in the program or by a new hire, but I do wish there was some plan to go back and fix them. This is particularly necessary with rare books where the Google Books copy is the only copy for most of us.
I should note, though, that I’ve downloaded a LOT of Google Books and given the millions of pages scanned, I don’t find it all that onerous to occasionally run across a gloved hand.
I have also seen scanned pages with fingers and other pages that are unreadable. In February of 2008 Google added the capability to report scanning errors via a link on each page.
At the time I sent an email to the Google Book Search team requesting the ability to report missing pages. They were agreeable and responsive, and now it is possible to report missing pages too.
There is a “Feedback” link for each page that is located near the upper right. If you click on it then you have two options for reporting: “Part of the page is unreadable” or “Missing page”. (The Feedback button location might vary based on browser/op-system. I am unsure. But the button should be visible somewhere.)
Google is building a remarkably powerful system, but the forces arrayed against it appear dominant. Use the system before it is shut down, and legislators extend copyright term to 1,000 years retroactively.