Tag: Google Books

Must-Read: Pam Samuelson et al.: About Us | Authors Alliance

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: A very worthy endeavor.

However, I feel like a gotta say here that Google Books was the best vehicle for them to realize their dreams.

What is the current state of Google Books, anyway?

Pam Samuelson, Holly van Howling, Tom Leonard, and Carla Hesse: About Us | Authors Alliance: “Authors Alliance promotes authorship for the public good…

… by supporting authors who write to be read. We embrace the unprecedented potential digital networks have for the creation and distribution of knowledge and culture. We represent the interests of authors who want to harness this potential to share their creations more broadly in order to serve the public good. Unfortunately, authors face many barriers that prevent the full realization of this potential to enhance public access to knowledge and creativity. Authors who are eager to share their existing works may discover that those works are out of print, un-digitized, and subject to copyrights signed away long before the digital age. Authors who are eager to share new works may feel torn between publication outlets that maximize public access and others that restrict access but provide important value in terms of peer review, prestige, or monetary reward. Authors may also struggle to understand how to navigate fair use and the rights clearance process in order to lawfully build on existing works.

The mission of Authors Alliance is to further the public interest in facilitating widespread access to works of authorship by assisting and representing authors who want to disseminate knowledge and products of the imagination broadly. We provide information and tools designed to help authors better understand and manage key legal, technological, and institutional aspects of authorship in the digital age. We are also a voice for authors in discussions about public and institutional policies that might promote or inhibit the broad dissemination they seek.

Must-Read: Tim Wu: What Ever Happened to Google Books?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: I wonder: Berkeley’s very sharp Pam Samuelson played a substantial role in helping to create this cluster#@$%. Yet I haven’t heard much from her trying to fix it. I wonder why not?

Tim Wu: What Ever Happened to Google Books?: “It was the most ambitious library project of our time…

…a plan to scan all of the world’s books and make them available to the public online…. Today, the project sits in a kind of limbo. On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes… but… most of it remains inaccessible. Searches of out-of-print books often yield mere snippets of the text–there is no way to gain access to the whole book…. It would be the world’s first online library worthy of that name. And yet the attainment of that goal has been stymied, despite Google having at its disposal an unusual combination of technological means, the agreement of many authors and publishers, and enough money to compensate just about everyone who needs it. The problems began with a classic culture clash when, in 2002, Google began just scanning books, either hoping that the idealism of the project would win everyone over or following the mantra that it is always easier to get forgiveness than permission….

By 2008, representatives of authors, publishers, and Google did manage to reach a settlement to make the full library available to the public, for pay, and to institutions. In the settlement agreement, they also put terminals in libraries, but didn’t ever get around to doing that. But that agreement then came under further attacks from a whole new set of critics, including the author Ursula Le Guin, who called it a ‘deal with the devil.’… Four years ago, a federal judge sided with the critics and threw out the 2008 settlement…. ‘Sounds like a job for Congress,’ James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland and one of the settlement’s more vocal antagonists, said at the time. But, of course, leaving things to Congress has become a synonym for doing nothing…. Google… [could] have declared the project a non-profit…. Authors and publishers… were difficult and conspiracy-minded…. Outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement…