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">The 800 Pound Gorillas in the Room - Part 1: Authors & Leaders Speculate on the Future of Google & Author Rights 2:30PM - 3:30PM (Friday, May 29, 2009) Panelist: Paul Aiken - Exec., Dir., The Authors Guild Michael Cader...
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Walt Crawford, who writes a valuable library blog called Walt at Random, took issue with my use of the term "privatization" to describe the Google Book Search project. He wrote a long response to Karen Coyle's criticism of his...
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O'Reilly Radar: Conclusion In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in...
continue reading "Pam Samuelson: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement - O'Reilly Radar" »
NYTimes.com: The New York Times April 4, 2009 Google's Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged By MIGUEL HELFT SAN FRANCISCO -- The dusty stacks of the nation's great university and research libraries are full of orphans -- books that the...
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Au Courant: Google, Robert Darnton, and the Digital Republic of Letters Robert Darnton recently published an essay in the New York Review of Books on the Google settlement. There has been much commentary in blogs, listserves, and print media. Below...
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Balkinization: Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly Frank Pasquale Like Robert Darnton, I look to the upcoming Google Book Search Settlement hearing with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. The prospect of constructing a digital library of...
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From Books Do Furnish a Room: Publishing, Copyright, Google I'll start with a confession: I was wrong about the Google Books Project. And my wrongness is underscored by just how right Siva Vaidhyanathan--whose worries I dismissed at the time as...
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Rough Type: All hail the information triumvirate! January 22, 2009 I was reading an interview today with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, in which he describes some of the Web 2.0-y tools that the company is preparing to...
continue reading "Nicholas Carr on the Google-Wikipedia symbiosis" »
New York Review of Books: Volume 56, Number 2 · February 12, 2009 Google & the Future of Books By Robert Darnton How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question...
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Timothy Vollmer offers us this great list. Check it out....
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NYTimes.com: November 30, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor How to Publish Without Perishing By JAMES GLEICK THE gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we'll always need...
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From Google Blog: Search and find magazines on Google Book Search 12/09/2008 09:47:00 AM The word "magazine" is derived from the Arabic word "makhazin," meaning storehouse. Since Daniel Defoe published the world's first English magazine back in 1704, millions of...
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John Wilkin's blog - The launch of HathiTrust ... Is this an effort that will compete with Google Book Search? We believe in the value the private sector can bring to great challenges like discovery, but we also believe that...
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Waking up to Books in Richmond: One of the irksome characteristics of the proposed Google Book Search settlement is the restricted access to the service at public libraries. Public libraries, we must recall, have long been public temples dedicated to...
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Coyle's InFormation: This Google/AAP settlement has hit my brain like a steel ball in a pinball machine, careening around and setting off bells and lights in all directions. In other words, where do I start? Reading the FAQ (not the...
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GBS is not a bookstore ... Please. Give me a break. Google Book Search, libraries, Amazon, and brick and mortar booksellers are not mutually substitutable vendors in the marketplace. FAIL. The question of the suits was not about obtaining access...
continue reading "Peter Brantley responds to Google's defense of price-fixing accusations with GBS settlement" »
The Laboratorium: Conclusion The starting point for all of this analysis has been that Google and the copyright owners are asking a federal court to put the United States’s judicial power behind a document they have presented to it. The...
continue reading "James Grimmelmann's comprehensive and essential analysis of the GBS settlement" »
Last week I asked Google's lawyers the following questions and received the following responses, which I have paraphrased: • Isn't this a tremendous anti-trust problem? Google has essentially set up a huge compulsory licensing system without the legislation that usually...
continue reading "Some initial answers to my initial questions about Google Book Search and the settlment" »
The Guardian: ... Amid all the reactions, an overall lesson should be how little can be determined by legalism, and how much remains unsettled as new technology causes shifts in markets and power. There's some value in enemy-of-my-enemy opposition, where...
continue reading "Seth on GBS settlement" »
Peter Suber, Open Access News...
continue reading "Must Read: Peter Suber summarizes and excerpts reactions to GBS settlement" »
The Google Settlement - From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore | Au Courant: The Google Settlement - From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore If you think about it, a universal bookstore is a pretty cool idea....
continue reading "Paul Courant's valuable account of what's at stake with the Google settlement" »
Madisonian I agree with comments that the “rights registry” aspect of the proposal is its most innovative and potentially problematic feature. There are serious antitrust questions to be asked and answered here, both as to the operation of what may...
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Scholarly Communications @ Duke: First, it is important to realize that this is a proposed agreement to settle a pending law suit. It must be approved by the court and may change in its details during that process. The plaintiff...
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Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader's Guide | Electronic Frontier Foundation Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader's Guide Legal Analysis by Fred von Lohmann As we reported earlier this week, Google has settled the lawsuit brought in 2005 by authors...
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Marcus Banks: Pros: * 20% free content in a book is much more meaningful than a few snippets. For authors, the chance for readers to get greater context will hopefully drive more sales. * Clarification of the roles of Google,...
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Google Book Search -- and Buy (ｩollectanea) ... And my own thoughts on and feelings about the deal are a combination of heartbreak, exhilaration, relief, pride, thankfulness, and gratitude to the libraries who worked so hard to make the deal...
continue reading "Georgia Harper is much more positive about the GBS settlement than I am" »
Chronicle.com: October 30, 2008 Harvard Says No Thanks to Google Deal for Scanning In-Copyright Works Harvard University has examined Google's recent legal settlement with publishers and authors, and found it wanting. The Harvard Crimson reported today that the university would...
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Balkinization: Google Book Search Settlement Neil Netanel EDITED ON OCTOBER 29: Google has reached a settlement with the authors and publishers who sued it for copyright infringement over Google's Book Search Project. If the 141 page settlement agreement (not including...
continue reading "A very helpful reading of the Google/publishers' settlement from Neil Netanel" »
Last night I opened my mail to find my royalty statement for my 2004 book, The Anarchist in the Library. I was elated to find that Basic Books had sold the Korean rights to it. And I was tickled to...
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Chronicle.com: Settlement Near in Google Book Search Lawsuit? Rumors are swirling again that the long-running lawsuit between publishers and Google over its book-scanning program is on the verge of a settlement. According to a report in Library Journal, anonymous sources...
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Chronicle.com: University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library By JEFFREY R. YOUNG A group of major universities has been quietly working for the past two years to build one of the largest online collections of books ever...
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New York Magazine: The End The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have...
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Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie-Mellon professor who invented the Captcha system that helps identify you as a human instead of a spamming computer, has rolled out a system that uses words from newspapers and books that the Internet Archive and...
continue reading "Putting Captchas to good use: helping to search old books " »
Chronicle.com: Library of Congress: Laws Need Revision to Encourage Digital Preservation Countries should change their laws and policies to encourage digital preservation of copyrighted works, according to a report released today by the Library of Congress. It drafted the report...
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Google Librarian Central: Endless summer Friday, July 11, 2008 9:28 AM Posted by Bethany Poole, Product Marketing Manager As you may have noticed, we've taken a somewhat leisurely summer break here at Librarian Central. We've been thinking about how to...
continue reading "Whoops! Google realizes it has been ignoring librarians." »
csmonitor.com: The field narrows for e-books As Microsoft backs away from digitizing old texts, some worry that a single company could privatize world knowledge. By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor / July 11, 2008...
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YouTube - Google Book Search: UC Library Partnership...
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Library Stuff: How Google Used Librarians…and Got Away With It June 29th, 2008 I know when I’m being used. It’s a learned trait after being used many times by friends, family, and colleagues. Exactly one year ago today, the Google...
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Scan and Release: Digitizing the Boston Public Library | Everything is Miscellaneous ... Of this abundance, the digital group has so far scanned about 24,000 objects. When I point out to Maura Marx, the group’s head, that, given the library’s...
continue reading "David Weinberger on the digitization of the Boston Public Library Misc. collections" »
OStatic: Google Now Hosts Open Source Libraries Written by Reuven Lerner - May. 27, 2008 Ajax, a programming/design technique that combines JavaScript, asynchronous HTTP connections, XHTML, and CSS, has turned the Web into a true application platform. Before Ajax, submitting...
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Wow. this is tremendously useful. Introduction This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues...
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Karen Coyle wants to know: OK, maybe I'm just in a particularly bad mood, but I guess I've just about had it with libraries shooting themselves in the foot. Then letting gangrene set in and going for amputation. I'm talking...
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Chronicle.com: Nonprofit Library Group Will Share Book Records With Google In an effort to increase the visibility of librariesâ holdings on the Web, Google and OCLCâformerly known as the Online Computer Library Centerâhave agreed to swap data. Under the arrangement,...
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The blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities has an interesting essay on this subject: But how reliable are these electronic texts? Can researchers feel comfortable citing them and using them for text analysis? In my view, the quality of an...
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John Wilkin writes: Metasearch vs. Google Scholar What the world needs now is not another metasearch engine. Mind you, having more and better and even free metasearch engines is a good thing, but there are already many metasearch engines, each...
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John Wilkin of the University of Michigan libraries was badly misquoted in an AP story on the digitization projects at the University of Michigan. On his blog, he uses that glitch (calling the Brewster Kahle's issues with Google "polemical," but...
continue reading "Between the "perfect" and the "good"?" »
This is pretty scholarly/geeky. But power Google users might find this interesting and funny. My colleague Bryan Pfaffenberger wrote: Dear colleagues: The following is an instructive, and I think hilarious, example of the need to proofread computer-generated bibliographies. I like...
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From if:book: Good news. Google has finally released an API (?) for Google Book Search: Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed...
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Kembrew McLeod broke this story and has been organizing widespread protest to it. Here is the Chronicle of Higher Ed Story about it: U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on...
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Editorial: Shape Shifters: Librarians Evolve Yet Again in the Age of Google: Editorial: Shape Shifters: Librarians Evolve Yet Again in the Age of Google Mariana Regalado Reference Librarian Brooklyn College Library Brooklyn NY 11210-2889 Jill Cirasella Reference Librarian Brooklyn College...
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Check out Cory Doctorow's new article, "Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers."...
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Chronicle.com: Google Plans to Expand Book-Scanning Partnerships Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google, says the company will expand its Book Search project, which has scanned more than a million books in conjunction with several...
continue reading "Google claims preservation IS one of the goals of Google Book Search" »
YouTube - The Human Knowledge Project...
continue reading "The Human Knowledge Project, Part 1: My Henderson Lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill" »
Corrected: Ok. So maybe I don't hear things that well. Sorry....
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Leslie Johnston explains: ... I do not know why so many people assume that this project is preserving the volumes -- Google does not say that; they say that they are creating access copies. The participant institutions know this, and...
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Google and Libraries Conference - March 10, 2008 « LACUNY Blog Register Now for Google and Libraries, on the METRO web site: Google and Libraries An International Conference Sponsored by ILIAC, The Harriman Institute and Columbia University Libraries, and METRO...
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On Wednesday afternoon I have a honor of delivering the Henderson Lecture at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. The subject of my talk will be: The Human Knowledge Project (Part 1): Four Conceptual Errors concerning Massive Digital...
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Chronicle.com: A Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan -- and Counting Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book...
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Eszter Hargittai on Crooked Timber: "What's in a Knol?": I address three issues concerning this new service of trying to create something Wikipedialike within Google’s domain: First, will it gain popularity? Second, what might we expect in terms of quality?...
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My neighbor and colleague Leslie Johnston writes: ... I have a slightly different spin and some different reasons, but I don't buy it either. I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist...
continue reading "More on the oversimplicity of "Digital Natives" etc." »
For a while I have been recoiling at all that talk about how young people today are "born digital" or are part of some special or distinct experiential universe that grants them special prowess or powers and blinds them to...
continue reading "The problem with "Digital natives," "Digital immigrants," and the "Digital generation" etc." »
Check out this hilarious scanning job Google did on The Gentleman's Magazine from 1855 for Book Search. Here is a frozen image:...
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Check out Google and Its Enemies by Jonathan V. Last. It does not break new ground. But it responds to Jonathan Band's arguments pretty well. It's a decent introduction to the copyright questions. Thanks to Cathy Davidson for the tip....
continue reading "The Weekly Standard (of all places) has a smart summary of the Google Books conflict" »
if:book: the NEA's misreading of reading: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum writes an elegant and concise critique of the National Endowment for the Arts' ominously titled new study of American reading trends, "To Read or Not to Read", which is a sequel...
continue reading "A brilliant critique of the NEA Reading report" »
Library Journal: Discussion of Google Scan Plan Heats Up on Blogs Now this is why we love the Blogosphere. In launching his blog, University of Michigan's (UM) dean of libraries Paul Courant recently offered a spirited defense of UM's somewhat...
continue reading "Library Journal summarizes the Courant-Vaidhyanathan conversation about Google Book Search" »
Ted Striphas knows more about the potential for and failures of electronic books than just about anyone. He is finishing up a book on the future of print right now. He wrote this about the Amazon Kindle: ...Though I may...
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Frank is one of my favorite legal scholars and bloggers. His new blog article, Conditions for the Digital Library of Alexandria, is essential reading: I have been in the middle of a major rethink of search engines’ efforts to digitize...
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Steve Levy at Newsweek wrote this in-depth story about the new Amazon e-book reader: The Future of Reading Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the...
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Paul Courant has some insight into this question: Paul Duguid’s comment on an earlier post of mine gets to important issues that I expect to discuss repeatedly (although not repetitiously) in this space. Among the big questions that he raises...
continue reading "How well does Google learn from its mistakes?" »
Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog has a nice summary of some of the rich commentary this week about Google and Google Book Search. In the post, he writes: (Picky criticism to go along with the praise for Siva: if one...
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As a comment to Ryan Shaw's post, "Libraries Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth," a bright guy named Patrick elaborates on what could be done with the right image formats: Patrick wrote: October 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm I...
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Ryan Shaw left a great comment below under the item about University of Michigan's Paul Courant's defense of Michigan's partnership with Google. Here is the text of his post about the image formats that Google is delivering to libraries and...
continue reading "Ryan Shaw explains the "image problem" with Google Book Search" »
Economist Paul Courant was the provost of the University of Michigan when it decided to be the first and boldest partner of Google for the library scanning project that has become part of Google Book Search. Paul recently became the...
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Tony Grafton is a