[Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

[Jim Campbell]

I'm not sure Roy is referring to the same problem.

Google has been a little vague about what is and is not available (and about
a lot of other things), but from what I've heard from friends in other
countries they seem for now to be taking the most conservative possible
interpretation of copyright for each country and then applying that to all
works, whether or not it's appropriate for a particular work or edition.  So
in the US anything published before 1923 is available because that's a
pretty easy thing to program, but for now they're not bothering with
individual works that may be in the public domain because life + 70 years
has expired or because copyright was not renewed.

As they keep saying, it is a beta, so mayb they'll move to a more nuanced
interpretation of copyright later on.  And that's something they can change.
I'm more worried about the poor quality of some of the scans and some of the
decisions about metadata such as not including volume numbers.  I know full
text search is supposed to take care of all that, but they're scanning a lot
of non-Roman alphabet texts and their OCR is miserable to non-existent.

- Jim Campbell
Campbell at Virginia.edu
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Roy Tennant
> Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:27 AM
> To: 'Web4Lib'
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of 
> out-of-copyright Books
> 
> On 8/30/06 8:16 AM, "David J. Fiander" <dfiander at uwo.ca> wrote:
> 
> > Leslie Johnston wrote:
> > 
> >> It's definitely not consistently available yet, but here's 
> an example:
> >> 
> >> 
> http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC18938030&id=HKackp-vG-YC&pg=PA9
> >> &lpg=PA9
> >> &dq=abbott+flatland
> > 
> > It's also only available within the United States.  While 
> Flatland is 
> > most definitely in the public domain worldwide, we 
> Canadians only get 
> > to see excepts, as if it was still a restricted text.
> 
> This is one of my gripes about Google Books. Although the 
> work itself may be clearly in the public domain, if a 
> publisher has republished it and is currently selling it, it 
> is locked down on Google Books. Add to this the fact that 
> Google Books apparently knows nothing about the freely 
> available out of copyright works on the Internet and you have 
> a ridiculous situation.
> Sometimes you are actually much better off searching Google 
> proper for a book than you are Google Books, since Google 
> *does* know about openly available out of copyright works.
> Roy
> 
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