These Google scans are also available in the HathiTrust [1], an organization built from the big academic libraries that participated in early book digitization efforts. The HathiTrust is better about letting the public read books that have actually fallen into the public domain. I have found many books that are "snippet view" only on Google Books but freely visible on HathiTrust.
If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of books that are still in copyright.
The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.
> Dan Clancy, the Google engineering lead on the project who helped design the settlement, thinks that it was a particular brand of objector—not Google’s competitors but “sympathetic entities” you’d think would be in favor of it, like library enthusiasts, academic authors, and so on—that ultimately flipped the DOJ.
I was at Google in 2009 on a team adjacent to Dan Clancy when he was most excited about the Authors’ Guild negotiations to publish orphan works and create a portal to pay copyright holders who signed up, and I recall that one opponent that he was frustrated at was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who filed a jealous amicus brief (https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yo...) complaining that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too. In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing which is what actually happened in the 15 year since then. Instead of one company selling out-of-print but in-copyright books, or multiple organizations, no one is allowed to sell them today.
Since then, of course, Brewster Kahle launched an e-library of copyrighted books without legal authorization anyway which will probably be the death of the current organization that runs the Internet Archive. Tragic all around.
I wish the contradiction you spotted was clear on their Wikipedia page. It demonstrates how far back IA's management troubles go, and how their clean image may have just been an image.
For me, I became concerned when they fibbed about why the Internet Archive Credit Union was liquidated. IA alleged it was shut down due to onerous regulations, but the government said IA actually never lived up to their goal of allowing local, low-income folk to sign-up for their service. https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
This is an insightful comment and I thank you for sharing it but, after having looked at the brief you linked
> a jealous amicus brief that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too
that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do agree with you on this part though
> the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing
Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently created its e-library was not ideal.
Thanks for making me aware of this. This guy's heart is clearly (to me) in the right place, but his understanding of power is seriously lacking. That's probably what gave him the hubris to create Wayback and IA, but he'll be absolutely dumbstruck when they shut it down.
I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation Project, circa 2001-2003. The stated goal was to "digitize all of the Library's collections" and while most people think of books, I was in the Motion Picture Broadcast and Recorded Sound Division.
In our collection were Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, wire spool recordings from reporters at D-Day, and LPs of some of the greatest musicians of all time. And that was just our Division. Others - like American Heritage - had photos from the US Civil War and more.
Anyway, while the Rights information is one big, ugly tangled web, the other side is the hardware to read the formats. Much of the media is fragile and/or dangerous to use so you have to be exceptionally careful. Then you have to document all the settings you used because imagine that three months from now, you learn some filter you used was wrong or the hardware was misconfigured.. you need to go back and understand what was affected how.
Also.. it was fun learning the answer to "what is the work?"
If you have an LP or wire spool recording, the audio is the key, obvious work. But then you have the album cover, the spool case, and the physical condition of the media. Being able to see an album cover or read a reporter's notes/labeling is almost as important as the audio.
As I (someone not close to these questions) understood it the recording, the composition, the lyrics, the score, the cover art are all under separate copyright as separate works.
The tapes/cases and the physical condition of the media are not under any copyright and are just the medium to carry a work. If they do carry any artistic work besides storing the transmitted artistic work they are also a work (like for example the design of the disc or holographic images on the disc that could be considered separate from the cover art: https://youtu.be/aEbAaL7fPl4?t=111).
Any of these parts might of course have sublicensed parts (like sounds, fonts, likenesses, etc) with differentiating expiration or terms.
Is the Library of Congress really beholden to copyright laws? I guess I assumed as the national deposit library they had a special exemption to copy any damn thing they pleased for archival purposes.
If they don't have that prerogative, they probably should, and Congress should legislate that to be the case.
It's somewhat ironic that, while the individual books are still accessible, their index pages https://www.oreilly.com/free and https://www.oreilly.com/openbook both redirect to some AI propaganda these days, with no links to the books left.
A huge proportion of this corpus is found in the Hathi Trust (see https://www.hathitrust.org/the-collection/). We have had a grant to crawl and derive an index on it via their supercomputing resources. I'm sure they are looking to LLM proposals, though they are exceedingly careful about the copyright issues.
“Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.” The idea was that in the future, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons. But books still lived mostly on paper. Page and his research partner, Sergey Brin, developed their popularity-contest-by-citation idea using pages from the World Wide Web.“
Larry Page had some cool ideas… can’t imagine Books will ever be resurrected, unfortunately.
He really wanted to digitize all of them to provide reference and training data for early language models (well before LLMs, transformers, etc).
He also had a plan (with George Church) to build enormous warehouses holding large-scale biology research infrastructure right next to google data centers. Because most biology research is done at locations that have reached their limit on computational/storage capacity.
Larry had many good ideas but he struggled to get the majority of them off the ground. For example, when Trump was president and invited all the major tech leaders, Larry came with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system with long-range DC.
> The idea was that in the future, once all books were digitized, you’d be able to map the citations among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data to give better search results to library patrons.
You can do something similar to this already, by mapping which books are cited in Wikipedia articles. If you know how to do such a thing, because I don't.
> Wikipedia is an essential component of the open science ecosystem, yet it is poorly integrated with academic open science initiatives. Wikipedia Citations is a project that focuses on extracting and releasing comprehensive datasets of citations from Wikipedia. A total of 29.3 million citations were extracted from English Wikipedia in May 2020. Following this one-off research project, we designed a reproducible pipeline that can process any given Wikipedia dump in the cloud-based settings. To demonstrate its usability, we extracted 40.6 million citations in February 2023 and 44.7 million citations in February 2024. Furthermore, we equipped the pipeline with an adapted Wikipedia citation template translation module to process multilingual Wikipedia articles in 15 European languages so that they are parsed and mapped into a generic structured citation template. This paper presents our open-source software pipeline to retrieve, classify, and disambiguate citations on demand from a given Wikipedia dump.
Prior work referenced in above abstract with some team overlap:
Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia [2021]
This seems to be the fate of knowledge/content that stays in institutions which have been built with the idea of collecting it and growing it.. but have turned into walled gardens/crypts of sort. Rot/Rust and be forgotten.
A very cynical and dark view is that the New things/people need that oblivion in order to feel great, for not haveing to compare with old great-er ones. Rewriting history as it seems fit the current powers-that-be, is easier this way.
Or may be it's just collective stupidity? or societal immaturity ?
(i am coming from completely different killed project on a different continent, but the idea is the same)
I am fairly certain there is more knowledge/content available to anyone in this century than last century or any century before it. But perhaps I have misread your comment.
I think you are on to something, people frequently don’t want to grapple with and understand what has been done before, they prefer to just wing it and move forward on their own.
IMO if a work is out of print (or equivalent depending on the medium) for more than a few years, it should be released into the public domain. Or maybe something like the public domain, but requires attribution.
Then every book will be immediately out of print after its initial run, while the not-quite-a-cartel of publishers all decline to print it until it hits the point where they no longer have to pay the author.
Then the publisher loses out on exclusive publishing rights and also loses money. It's in their interests to keep it in print so long as it's a profitable book, even if they have to pay some percentage to the author. Once it goes into public domain every publisher can reprint it and the original publisher has to compete with them on price.
I'm not arguing for it (or against it for that matter), I was just pointing out that the analysis in the comment I responded to didn't make sense. Every book won't be allowed to fall out of print and copyright just to exploit the authors because it would also hurt the publishers, they also benefit from exclusive publishing rights. Publishing rights are granted by the copyright holder (the author) to the publisher, much like patent licenses.
Regarding unprofitable books, they'll fall out of print anyways because they're unprofitable. Those authors won't be getting ripped off because they won't be making money either way beyond initial commissions and what few sales they get.
> Much better for it to revert to the author in that situation IMO.
The publisher doesn't hold the copyright, the author does, so copyright (the particular right under discussion) can't revert to the author as it never left the author. What the publisher holds is publishing rights per a contract with the author. That could revert back to the author (or be voided or however it's structured), and that would be reasonable but we don't need any laws for it, that would fall under normal contract terms. Whether it's a common thing now or feasible for a particular author (with no clout? maybe not, with billions in sales from prior books? probably) is another matter.
Just my opinion but as a starting point for the argument...
* 20 years from date of first publish (renewable up to CAP? 50 years)
* Must remain available every year
* 10 year renewal blocks with massive registration fee increases
* Compulsory maximum license fee cap (can offer for less) in the laws
Note this is not TRADE MARK; trade marks are _consumer protection_ related to 'brand ownership'.
Even 50 is a lot, because it starts at the death of the author. Popular culture shouldn't remain locked out for generations. 50 maximum would be ideal, two generations from the one who experienced it in the original cultural context.
With library genesis, who needs Google Books anymore? I buy books physically to support the author/s and download an epub version from said site to my kindle. The physical books I hardly read, they are for my shelf. Although I love the feeling of printed books, but I read in bed, and it‘s easier to hold an ebook. Also I read when I commute. It’s lighter to have my Kindle Oasis with me with tons of books on it.
There’s the everything available online for free mindset. But, yes, I’ve basically donated all my books that were in the public domain. And, in general, have been massively purging my book collection of stuff I won’t realistically read again.
For Kagi users, I recommend putting books.google.com as a pinned domain. This way, you'll many times be presented with some of the best sources for any search query. Then it's a matter of finding the ePub file of that book. To read on MacOS, FBReader is a high quality app.
The tragedy is that Google is tasked with this at all. It would be cool if public libraries could work together on a massive public digital library. This shouldn't be Google's responsibility.
arguably Google was invented to fund this project.
The books project predates the search engine and the search engine grew out of the project of creating a universal digital library. The PageRank algorithm is one of a class of algorithms used to score citations in books and papers.
All humans everywhere have a responsibility to preserve culture and knowledge to the best of their ability. I think what you meant to say is that none of us can trust Google with this important task.
If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of books that are still in copyright.
The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.
[1] https://www.hathitrust.org/
reply