[Web4lib] Another publisher group asks Google to stop digitizing books for Google Print for Libraries

[bernhard Eversberg]

Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers is
> following the lead of the Association of American University Presses and
> the AAP in asking Google to halt book digitization:
> 
> http://www.alpsp.org/2005pdfs/Googlestatement.pdf 
> 
> Note: this is not Google-bashing. :-)
> 
Neither the following:

Whereas regular Google result lists are ordered by PageRank, result
lists of the Print service have no apparent order, not even by pub
date. (A PageRank, obviously, cannot be calculated for digitized books.)

While G.P. may be unbeatable when searching for the very rare name or
word or combinations of moderately rare words, they will have to start
thinking about how to order the results to make them useful in cases
where you get upwards of 20 or so. (Books tend to be much longer than
the average web document, so and decently frequent word occurs with
enourmous frequency in a full-text book index.)

And: "Find it in a library" seems to be only available when the item is
definitely out of print and not under copyright.


Bernhard Eversberg
Universitätsbibliothek Braunschweig
Germany