Google Print Beta goes live today furthering Google’s attempt at their goal of organizing the world’s information on the Internet. Problems may exist however with copyright problems and culture wars abroad and whatever happened to Gutenberg?
Editor’s Note: Today, Google launched the live beta verision of Google Print. How do you think this will impact the publishing industry? Will Google challenge Amazon as a primary choice for book searches? Discuss at WebProWorld.
Google Print has entered and cataologued a huge number of books from various libraries in the U.S. and put them into an online library of sorts and continues to do so. The massive undertaking will cover both books in the public domain, which will be put in their entirety on line, and copyrighted material, which will contain a very small portion of the book, maybe just a sentence or two in some cases.
The title at the top of the list wasn’t “Huck Finn” however. It was “The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English”. The actual book, the Adventures of Huck Finn showed up at the bottom of the first page, behind a study guide of the legendary American novel.
What you see when you click the link was a few pages from the book, specifically Suggestions for Further Reading, no text at all. It provided links the publisher, Penguin and online booksellers Amazon, Barnes&Noble, BookSense and Froogle.
You also see a cover in full color that’s a recent printing of the book. All in all, not bad. It gives the user information on how to track down the book. So, I think about ordering a copy of the wonderful novel myself. Except that I can go to Project Gutenberg and get it for free. It’s a scanned copy of an 1885 printing of the book, complete with original illustrations as well as a standard typed text of the book.
Google Vs. Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers hundreds of books and documents digitized onto the Internet into an e-book format. Google Print just gives me the option to buy the book. Heck, with Project Gutenberg, I can download the book and send it over a peer-to-peer network (now there’s another can of worms).
The major flaw with Gutenberg is since all of their works have to be in the public domain; pretty much all their stuff predates the roaring 20s. Anything more modern has special rules that apply or they’re not in there at all. Google Print covers many more modern books. But Google also states on their website that this is a project to draw attention to online libraries in general.
Another issue seems to be the culture war. When Google first announce this massive undertaking. Several European folks were up in arms because Google was using primarily books in English, although not exclusively, and mainly those books originally written in the English language.
The French began a meltdown feeling their culture was left out of this massive cultural undertaking since they had already digitized more than 80,000 volumes in the French National Libraries store houses and Murdok’ own Jason Miller did a controversial article on the topic earlier this month. Suffice it to say, the European culture auditors felt were not happy.
Finally, and perhaps the single most important issue of this whole thing is the copyright issue. A number of stories have been published already on this matter. The Gutenberg Project applies the rule of nothing before 1923 for almost everything. So, Google Print must be careful in order to make this project work. Google has taken the same 1923 stance, as the fine for each instance of copyright infringement is a nasty $125,000. A few of those and Google’s goose would be cooked.
Some university press organizations and other publishing groups have watched this project very closely although Google feels like copyright issues won’t be a problem since for copyrighted materials; Googlites only get a few pages worth of text for the copyrighted material.
The flaw with this so far is in this area though. Some of what Gutenberg offers as public domain, Google counts as copyrighted, particularly older works that are still popular, like “Huck Finn” or “Tarzan of the Apes” but as mentioned before, Gutenberg doesn’t have much modern work whereas Google isn’t limited nearly as much.
There are a lot of books in the Google Print endeavor. At Google’s information page about all this, they got sections for publishers and users. Google says for the moment, they aren’t planning to add much more unless it’s something specialized.
As with most Betas, there will be bugs to work out and perhaps they will add an advance search feature and who knows what else with books on tape or CD or even DVD becoming more popular and considering mobile searches from PDAs and mobile phones and other devices continue to spread. But as with many ventures, Google will continue its attempts to innovate and go down roads less traveled or as “Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien put it:
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
