
Six Reasons Google Books Failed - tomh
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/28/six-reasons-google-books-failed/
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Jun8
OK, call me a hopeless capitalist but the Digital Public Library of America
(DPLA) idea he proposes will not work, only companies at the scale of Google
will be able to tackle the overhead involved and be willing to walk the
associated minefield.

The opinions on this issue that I have read generally range from the gung-ho
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this should be done" to
the somebody else's problem philosophy "This is a job for
government/congress/etc.". The judge's written opinion is the latter.

Darnton says "This provision made Google and its partners effective
proprietors of works they had not created." This, I believe, is the major
roadblock for many (old-fashioned) creators: you are making money off from
poor writers. Advocates of this approach fail to acknowledge the immense costs
of creating and maintaining such a system. And how much money do the authors
of orphan works make now? _Zero dollars_.

The European efforts cited are AFAIK were reactionary to Google's scanning
program. One should remember that not all such grandiose European programs
work (e.g. what happened to Galileo GPS system?) because of the major
fracturing, e.g. France's Gallica has ~1.7M books but they seem to be mostly
old, out of copyright works.

~~~
brudgers
> _"OK, call me a hopeless capitalist but the Digital Public Library of
> America (DPLA) idea he proposes will not work, only companies at the scale
> of Google will be able to tackle the overhead involved and be willing to
> walk the associated minefield."_

Or the Library of Congress - which is already the public library of the US.

~~~
bane
One problem with the LoC is that they don't really do a great job of making
the collection readily available.

Sure they have <http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html>

Which is "ok". But it's not really searchable, the interfaces are clunky, and
I can't really just go find say...the Wizard of Oz series, or review historic
maps of my state without going through dozens of clicks in an interface that's
taking up about 1/6th of my screen real estate (and only downloadable as a jpg
or an obscure geodata format called MrSid).

Ugh.

It's obvious that a ton of thought has gone into organizing the data, but not
much into retrieval.

By comparison, it took me .16 seconds to find the Wizard of Oz books...and oh,
if I care, a play in three acts, some song books, and other odds and ends.

~~~
brudgers
Well searching for "Wizard of Oz" on Google is about like searching for "hot
teen sex" in that there is a lot of commercial incentive for Google to return
results and returning something relevant is trivial given that Google's
algorithms are tuned to return potentially monetizable results over a
diversity of potentially informative results.

In other words, when was the last time something from the LOC appeared as a
result of your Google search - such as the copyright data from Webvoyage? For
example google("wonderful wizard of oz" copyright) and try to find this highly
relevant information from the LOC [[http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=wo...](http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=wonderful+wizard+of+oz&Search_Code=TALL&PID=ZqdhJaFSnrx5ND9EGwjligovREBc&SEQ=20110329091338&CNT=25&HIST=1)]

Aside on MrSid - if you are archiving a map for reference as a map rather than
clip art it is ideal, and archiving maps for use as maps is what the LOC does.
On the flip side, Google's goal is to sell advertising for companies like
"worldsbestmaps.com" and so returning useless (from a map making perspective)
results increases the value of Google ads to those companies.

------
WalterBright
Copyright holders should be obliged to register their works after 10 years and
every 10 years thereafter or so. The list of the registrations should be
publicly accessible on the internet. If they can't be bothered to do it, the
works should slip into the public domain.

And I speak as someone who makes his living from copyrighted works.

------
jdp23
James Grimmelmann's got an excellent analysis of the Google Books opinion at
[http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chin...](http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chins_opinion)

------
Fester
This article should have been named 'Six Reasons Why Google Books Does Not
Satisfy My Needs'. I beleive Books are a constant source of revenue for
Google, and let's be honest, that is the only reason for corporations to
exist.

Oh, btw Goole Books snippets are getting injected into my search results more
and more often, so it looks like the idea of searching through the books isn't
dead at all.

------
coliveira
The way for Google to solve this issue is to just do like any other company
out there and sign agreements with authors and publishers. They will never get
the "orphan" works, but who cares? There are many more books that "will" be
published then what "has been" published.

