The Hands of Google

Asher Moses has a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Book scans reveal Google's handiwork, which introduces us to a new, undiscovered component of the digitization process; the hand scan.

"Digital bookworms reading titles like the 1855 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine and Plato's The Trial and Death of Socrates have been surprised to find large chunks of some pages blocked by manicured paws clad in pink finger condoms."

Rob Shilkin, Google's Australia spokesman, tells us that "in the time since we initially began our scanning, we've vastly improved our scanning technology so that a random finger is automatically brought to our attention long before we return the book back to the shelf."

Scanning 1.0 includes fingers and hands
Scanning 2.0 uses "improved scanning technology to ensure wayward fingers no longer get in the way."
Scanning 3.0 ...


The TechCrunch take

Link to the Gentleman's Magazine with finger intrusion.
Don't you think it's a little weird that the scan for The Gentleman's Magazine begins with a woman's fingers covered in pink finger condoms?

Digitization and the Bookseller

Booksnap

Welcome to the next disruptive technology for the book trade.

The force of commerce and the march of technology are soon to meet again at the booksellers door. The door might not be open for long but if entered correctly it might become a new source of revenue for the bookseller.

Once Google's romance with the libraries is over do you think Google will stop looking for other sources of information to feed the machine?

I would guess within 5 years or so Google will have cycled through the library trade and determined who they will be playing with and they will know what information they've acquired.

Outside of libraries booksellers are one of the few repositories for untapped information. There is an enormous amount of unique content stored within the confines of the bookselling trade. From books long out of print to ephemeral items that present core samples of our material culture, there is a treasure trove of content awaiting the light of digitization.

More importantly the active bookseller is acquiring material at an equal or in many cases a faster pace then libraries or institutions and they often handle the material before it lands in these special collections.

The race would seem to be between Google and the first company to bring the cost of quality digitizing technology down so that the independent bookseller can afford it.

Early this year we had the release of the Espresso Book Machine, a $50,000 vending machine that will print and bind you a book in 7 minutes. Impressive but cost prohibitive for most booksellers. Earlier this month the first offering of affordable technology arrived. BookSnap, "the first digital book ripper designed for individual consumers," hit the market. At a price of$1595 (without cameras) it is within reach though as a first generation technology it has some expected limitations.

“We designed the BookSnap for people who have always wanted to digitize their personal libraries but haven’t had a viable way to do it – until now,” said Nick Warnock, president, Atiz Innovation.

The limitations:
-Their horrendous tagline "It's not a scanner. It's a book ripper," clearly they are not coming at this from the book side of things.
-Translates the captured text into PDF format only.
-Booksnap has the ability to capture 500 pages an hour. This sounds impressive until you realize that the page turning process is not automated. Do you have they ability to turn 500 pages an hour?
Here is how it works.

I hope the book trade doesn't wait for the Google monster to descend before the digitization issue is addressed. We should be exploring the possibilities of working with the likes of the Open Content Alliance and the Prelinger Archive to devise strategies to digitally capture the content that moves through the trade.

Of course, the content has to first be digitized for the public good; for the most important part of the process is to preserve our culture's output and provide free access to it. Then, and only then should we monetize the content. I believe both can happen.


Previous Book Patrol post Books: Espresso Style or Another Nail in the Coffin of the New Bookstore

Libraries Resist Google. Is the Tide Turning?

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance said.

Amen.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out...One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.” Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Vote For Openness!

Book scanning stations at the Internet Archive.

Quotes and image above from Katie Hafner's piece in today's New York Times Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books online.

It is a good sign to see this debate reach this level. Awareness is a major ingredient in change and the New York Times is a major ingredient in awareness.

Previous Book Patrol posts:
The Digital Battle for our Literary Heritage
Other Books and Google posts


Image by Ann Johannson.

The Google Quandary: Book Search or Text Search?

Apart from the text does Google Book Search really have anything to do with the life of a book?

I am not so sure.

As Paul Duguid points out in his illuminating piece Inheritence and loss? A brief survey of Google Books:

"Even with some of the best search and scanning technology in the world behind you, it is unwise to ignore the bookish character of books."

Using Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as his book of choice Duguid exposes some major quality control issues inherent in Google's digitization process. From missing pages to poorly scanned pages to the complete absence of vital data (like lack of volume numbers or edition) the reliability of the project itself is now questionable at best.

Here are some other gems from the piece:

-"transferring any complex communicative artifacts between generations of technology is always likely to be more problematic than automatic."

-the "newer form is always in danger of a kind of patricide, destroying in the process the resources it hope to inherit."

-"With each scanned page, Google Books’ Library Project, by its quantity if not necessarily by its quality, makes the possibility of a better alternative unlikely. The Project may then become the library of the future, whatever its quality, by default."

Aside from the quality issues the entire material culture of the book is discarded. Google is an information monster whose only concern is content. We get only text and no context. We lose too much.

As you can imagine the piece has stirred up some debate. Most notably from Patrick Leary, the editor of the SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) listserv and author of the article Googling the Victorians (pdf), who disses Druguid calling his effort "perversely wrongheaded" and "silly." Leary sticks to the pros of the Google Book Search as a research tool and tosses Druguid argument out the window.
Druguid's piece has little to do with the benefits of the increased availability of content for the researcher and Leary's comments seem inappropriate and somewhat angry. Coming from someone so involved in book history is a bit baffling.

Peter Brantley at O'Reily Radar shares the exchange that took place between Druguid and Leary. The post as well as the comments are a must read for anyone interested in this issue.

Rare Books, The Bookshop and Open Access

Joseph Campana's piece, Rare Books, appeared on the Kenyon Review blog last week. The jumping off point for Campana was the New York Times article on the closing of the Heritage Book Shop, one of the premier antiquarian book shops in the world.

Campana recounts his first memories of encountering a rare book at his college library and how he is as "willing to make a fetish of rare books as the next person." Yet he ends the article by professing to have more of a sense of "ambivalence, not wonder" toward rare books.
He then goes on to say that the rare books within Heritage's walls should after all "be held by libraries where they might be more broadly available." I'm not sure I agree.

Bookshops are one of the few places where one can get open access, they are places where anyone can walk into and see and handle books they only dreamed about. In many cases you have greater access to rare books at a bookshop than you do at the library. Yes, they might not be able to afford to buy the book but the experience of handling it is priceless.

Just yesterday someone came into the shop and asked if we had any editions of Machiavelli's The Prince. I showed him the the copy we had, it was one of 10 copies printed in a full vellum binding in 1929. He knew and I knew he wasn't going to buy the book (it is $1500) but he was able to spend some time with it in his hands and you could see in his eyes what a special experience it was for him. To a varying degree this opportunity exists at any used bookshop. One can walk in and happen upon a book or a piece of ephemera that is intimately tied to a book or subject that one is passionate about. This experience cannot be duplicated electronically.

As Campana notes, throughout much of history books have been a luxury item for the wealthy. It is only in the last 150 years or so that book ownership has permeated all tiers of society.

Michael Kearns points out in his essay, "The Material Melville" that appears in Reading Books:Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (University of Massachussets Press, 1996), the American book-buyer in the first half of the nineteenth century was motivated by a "desire to own a tangible piece of culture, [and] the wish to display possessions that represent economic achievement as well as cultural sophistication." The book as a status symbol.

I also agree with Campana in that "books (old, new, borrowed or blue) should be most available to those who perhaps don’t know they need them." The only way this is possible is by open access. The digitization of rare books is an essential democratic activity in that the text is potentially available to all who desire to see it. The rare book on the other hand is very much a commodity bound to the laws of capitalism. Technology has now made it possible for the textual history of our planet to be accessed by anyone with a computer and connectivity. It is this access to information that is the issue and is what we should all be fighting for. Google is in the process of digitizing enormous amounts of our literary and cultural heritage and it is they who will be the gatekeepers. They will determine who gets access. Some will get a snippet, some will get a preview and only the ones who pay up will get full access.

The closing of Heritage is not something one should be ambivalent about for it is the closing of one of the prime access points for rare books in the world.

Google Book Search: A Report From the "Google Five"

The first five libraries that jumped on the Google digital book train took time at the recent ALA Annual Conference to weigh in on how things are going. The Google Five are the libraries of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and Stanford and the New York Public Library.

Though all five said that they were "pleased with the progress" they also acknowledged that there have been some issues, which range from books being damaged to questions about the quality of searches being performed. One library had someone complain because some of the scans have thumbs visible! And over at Oxford's Bodleian Library they have a 1% problem. One percent of their books have uncut pages, meaning that they've never been opened, making them unscanable.

The damaged books issue has to raise some bright red flags. These guys are not scanning trade hardbacks or mass market paperbacks, they are scanning much of the choice material held in the special collections of these institutions. Any damage is a significant event.

Dale Flecker of Harvard University library says that they were "filtering out a lot of works that are not physically up to being scanned." Noting that there have been problems dealing with the brittle paper of many of the works and with some of the bindings. And remember, this deal allows Google to take possession of these treasures and actually remove the books from the library and take them to their scanning facility.

What has always struck me as worrisome about this part of the agreement is that here they have given Google permission to take these artifacts to their house when they won't permit their students or the scholars who intimately know these works a chance to check them out.

The tools of the technology, in this case the scanning machine, that were developed to help bring these book treasures to our desktop are now also involved in the selection process. It's limitations are deciding what gets digitized.



Library Journal piece on the "Google Five" from their Academic Newswire

Censorship at Home and Abroad

This was one of last weeks Daily Number at the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press .

The headline: 46% support public school library book banning.

The good news is that this is the "lowest level of support in 20 years."

What are these "dangerous ideas" that people want to keep from their kids?

Isn't the act of keeping our kids from these ideas just as dangerous?

Then we have Google going full throttle with their campaign to fight censorship. Their guns are aimed at Washington, D.C. in the hope of getting Government support in their fight for the free flow of information throughout the world.

"It's fair to say that censorship is the No. 1 barrier to trade that we face," says Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government affairs.

Their timing on this issue is impeccable and though Google claims no political motive I can see this issue creeping into the presidential races and finding broad political support rather quickly.

This is after all a non-violent way to "bring to the world the best of American ideals about freedom of expression, creativity, and innovation."

Google's back is against the wall. They already censor their searches in a number of countries and realize the trend is moving toward censorship and away from the free flow of information. In a recent OpenNet Initiative poll 25 of 41 countries surveyed are engaged in some form of Internet censorship. In 2002 that number was 2 or 3.

This is what they said when they entered China:

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission"

To be in China they had to severely compromise their core business model.

How many times can you compromise it before it becomes altered?

Google, The Big Ten and Digital Escrow

In on fell swoop Google has significantly increased the number of libraries they have under contract and has introduced a new species of digitization; digital escrow.

By corralling the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium of the libraries of the Big Ten and the University of Chicago, Goggle brings the number of partner libraries to 25 and add over 78,000,000 potential items to their digi-mix.

Some of terms of the agreement:
-The CIC makes at least a 10,000,000 volume commitment.
-Google "reserves final discretion over which Available Content it will Digitize."
-Google shall own all rights to their copy and can use it at their discretion.
-Google will digitize both in-copyright and out-of-copyright material. The out of copyright material will be readily available to the CIC and the public.

and the kicker- Google will hold the in-copyright material in digital escrow until either they get permission from the copyright holder or the material enters the public domain.

In other words, they will scan them, hold them and when they can monetize them they will share them.

I still don't see how this benefits the general public but I do see how this new twist possibly influenced Simon & Schuster in their recent author contract alterations. If the publishers don't start hanging on to digital rights they will all eventually revert to Google.

Links:

The agreement

List of some of the CIC collection hi-spots

Peter Brantley's post "Monetizing Libraries." Brantley is the director of the Digital Library Federation

Publisher's Weekly article "Google Scanning Deal Details Provoke Controversy"

The Reflective Librarian has a comparison of Google Book Search and Microsoft's Live Search

Book Patrol past Google posts

Google the Bookseller

It was bound to happen.

Word from the London Book Fair is that Google is going into the book business. By year's end they will launch two book related initiatives that will further alter the book landscape.

What's in store:

A book rental program that will let you rent the content of a book on a weekly basis.

and

A book retail program that will allow users lifetime access to the texts they purchase.

They are not attaching the cursed e-book tag to either project.

Michael Cairnes, who was at the Google sessions at the London Book Fair, has the scoop in his blog post titled "Google Lending Books" which includes his follow up with Google on these initiatives.

This is the missing piece to the puzzle.

Their aggressive approach to libraries and their books begins to make sense. They are scanning books at warp speed, 30,000 a week just at the University of Michigan.

Google has become part of the DNA of information. It would seem a logical next step to corner the library market. They are homes to our written heritage, storehouses of knowledge and information. And Google needs information. The Google Monster is hungry.

Last month's article by Eric Morath at the Detroit News on Google's scanning of the University of Michigan's 7 million volume library touched on this.

"In Google's view, even the wide expanse of the Internet can't compare to the amount of knowledge stored in books. So searching and retrieving results from written works is a natural outgrowth of Google's root technology.

Forget all the fuss you hear like "Google's altruistic motive for the project is to make the books available to those who may not have easy access to them."

When you hear Allan Adler, the American Association of Publishers' (AAP) vice president for legal and government affairs say "There's no doubt whatsoever that it's to Google's financial benefit to do this" you can be sure that altruism as been thrown out the window. The AAP is the political action committee for the publishing world and mix that with Google's billions of dollars and you have poisonous potential.

"Google argues that the limited amount of information it displays ultimately benefits holders of the copyright because it encourages searchers to seek out the book." Those snippets and limited views that they throw at you now become teasers. You got to pay to play.
This is why I argue for public funds and not for profit companies to undertake the digitization of our cultural heritage. This is exactly why.

Has anyone heard the word author mentioned anywhere in all this? Copyright and publishers are everywhere.

In addition to adding another layer of complexity to the term bookseller, the meaning of out-of-print will soon change too. Out-of-print will no longer mean unavailable. It will mean unavailable in book form.

Until Google gets in the print on demand business.

Then what happens when they start buying the publishers?

This is serious stuff.

Links

Robert Townsend at the American Historical Association blog Google Books: What's Not to Like

Jill E. Grog and Beth Ashmore's article at Information Today Google Book Search Libraries and Their Digital Copies. Includes a list of what libraries are digitizing everything and which ones are only digitizing material in the public domain.

Past Book Patrol posts:
on the AAP and their "Caught Reading" campaign
The First Cracks in Google's Attempt to Digitize the World

The First Cracks in Google's Attempt to Digitize the World

Peter Brantley is the director of strategic technology for academic information systems at the University of California, one of the premier libraries that have entered into a relationship with Google to digitize their holdings.

Here is some of what he had to say about the initiative:

-it was mistake
-The goal is undeniably grand, and good.
The means have left much to be desired.
-We poisoned our hand before we played it
-For the love of selfish confidence, we spoke neither our fortune nor our misgivings with our neighbors or our friends
-In our selfishness, and wrapped in the fears we were given, we re-wrote and redefined our aims, misplaced our responsibilities, allowed the light and glory of the ideal to suffuse its glow over the bargain’s deficits
-The deals are not fair. We were taken advantage of. We are asked to be grateful for something wondrous where we could have achieved more for ourselves and demanded more from others
-There are bigger things yet to lose, and the losing, we have learned, is easy.

He went on to proclaim that it is not to late to "re-write the rules for the future...for us – libraries, museums, and non-profit presses – to reassert the validity of our aims, our missions, and our expectations"

Clearly this is far from a match made in heaven. One can only imagine the response to this from the Google monster and the university's administration. Five days later Brantley chimed in again. His need this time was to clarify his stance a bit. He did the Google isn't evil routine and stated that his "primary intent in the post is to suggest disappointment with libraries (not with Google). I felt that there was much to be gained -- and I still feel very strongly so -- from union, collaboration, and sharing among libraries of the immense issues raised by this effort"

This brings us to another recent related development that needs some attention.

On Tuesday James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, testified before the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Legislative Branch . He urged Congress to restore the $47 million cut from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The $47 million represents almost 50% of the total budget for the program. The $47 million does not include $37 million in matching funds that would be lost due to the cuts.

One of the new NDIIPP projects affected by the cuts was Preserving Creative America "an effort to work with private industry to archive creative content such as "digital film, music, photography, other forms of pictorial art and even video games."
also Billington reported that the Library of Congress "is progressing in its initiative to build a World Digital Library (WDL)." This is the program the just received the a $3 million grant from Google to start the project."

Billington acknowledges that searchers can find a "flood of information" on Google but he goes on to say that at the Library of Congress:

"Our goal is to integrate the best available electronic information into the knowledge, judgment and wisdom contained in books and in the minds of our curators so that Congress and the American people continue getting the same authentic, reliable information and knowledge that have been the hallmark of the Library since its inception in 1800."

Here is a link to the Senators on the subcommittee. Contact them.

Previous Posts:
Digital Battle For Our Literary Heritage
More on the Digital Battle for Our Literary Heritage


Thanks to Open Access for the Brantley lead and to Rare Book News for the lead on the Billington testimony

The Digital Battle For Our Literary Heritage: The Internet Archive vs. Google

"Libraries exist to preserve society's cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it's essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world."

One of the most important battles in the book world today is the fight for who gets to digitally archive our literary heritage.

From the leading university libraries to the great collections housed in our public institutions decisions are being made that could potentially alter access to the treasure trove of material that lies within their walls.

It is an idea and technology whose time has come. The promise of offering the primary texts of our country's (or the worlds for that matter) literary and historical heritage to its citizens to access from any computer in the land is as democratic an activity that one could hope for.

The problem here is in the execution. Google has taken the lead here. They are an over funded 'public' company with private interests who have already acquired digital dibs on choice content.

The Internet Archive, one the other hand, is a not-for-profit organization determined to provide the content of the public domain to the public for free via the Internet.

Of course it is hard to compete with a Google who has tons of money to throw at our cash-starved libraries but this is about much more than money. Unlimited and free access, the right of every citizen, to our cultural history and identity cannot be compromised.

If Google wants to digitize the collections of private institutions by all means go ahead but to venture into the realm of digitizing the content of public institutions (remember University libraries are public institutions) is a slippery slope that unfortunately we have started to slide down.

We need to do all we can to stop this digital freight train. The message is simple. For profit companies cannot digitize the content of public institutions or public libraries.

Let the Internet Archive take care of digitizing the treasures of our public institutions and libraries. We can set aside a portion of the budget for the Library of Congress (a current supporter) and the Smithsonian Institution or how about a 1% digital archive tax on every new computer purchased.
The point is we need to get creative here. Fast.

We need to buy back the rights that were sold to Google (at a premium of course) and go about doing this the right way.

Also of note is the recent news of our U.S. National Archives entering into an agreement with Footnote.com to digitize millions of historical records and ephemera that are in the public domain. We are talking about source material from our Continental Congress to Civil War photographs of Matthew Brady. The catch: $100 a year to join Footnote to view most of the documents.
What in the world is Footnote.com? Google is one thing but to sell out to Footnote.com is downright embarrassing.

Google's next battle will be against the wiki world. Let's hope the Internet Archive's next battle is with Congress for funding.

On the topic:
my past posts: internet archive and Google
if:book post
Dan Cohen, author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, post
CNet article from Oct 05 "Google's battle over library books."
Thanks to Cheap Priceless Editions for this one

lead quote from from the Internet Archive

A Couple from the Google Monster

There has been much hoopla over the launch of Google's new patent search tool. I am pretty certain all the info was already easily available at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) but hey this is a Google world.
I had to dig deep to find this book related one. A patent for the "Slanted Book" designed in 1974 by Richard A. Kjarsgaard. Here is the diagram:

From what I can make out it looks like the same book design perfected by my dog Roxy who had a brief book chewing phase while a puppy.

Much more important is the article at D-Lib Magazine by David Berman. It is a review of Jean-Noël Jeanneney's book, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe. Jeanneney is the President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which is the equivalent of our Library of Congress, and he voices some serious concerns over Google, a private company, digitizing what it sees fit.

Here is a excerpt that raises the reddest of flags:

Noting that Netscape seemed invincible before the advent of Microsoft IE, but disappeared as a company within years, he asks rhetorically what happens if Google is split up in a monopolies decision, implodes in the market or is sold? Perhaps, we should ask, what if it is sold to the Chinese, who might decide to limit content served to us as Google has recently agreed to limit that served to Chinese citizens?

That should be enough of a concern to immediately derail this car from the Google train and have the public fund and oversee this vital transformation of our written heritage.

Google Book Search: The New Literary Lie Detector

"Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal" - T.S. Eliot

The plagiarism police have found a new weapon: Google Book Search

First there is the story of Winston Churchill borrowing a few lines from H.G. Wells, though not directly attributed t0 the Google Book Search technology one would assume there was a good chance the writer employed it during his research.
War of the Worlds - World Wars - Talk about the boundaries of truth and fiction.
I can't wait to find out who President Bush is getting his lines from.

Then the story of Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan "copying phrases and sentences for his best-selling novel “Atonement” in 2001 from a memoir published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews, a former nurse and an acclaimed writer of romantic novels"

In McEwan's reply he acknowledges Andrews as an inspiration but not the source of his text.

Undoubtedly, as our access to information continues to increase, whether through Google Book Search or other research tools, long shadows will be cast on our literary heritage.

This is simply another unintended consequence created by a new technology.

Talk about opening a "can of words"


Links to some good stuff regarding the McEwan caper from the Guardian:

John Mullan
John Sutherland
Sarah Crown