Because They're French!

The Bookseller reports today that France is launching a competitor to Google Book Search.

Of course they are.

Barbara Cassasus writes:

The project, to be unveiled at the [Paris Book] fair, will offer more than 60,000 digitised works from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and 2,000 from about 50 publishers, some of whom received subsidies for the purpose. The BNF plans to add another 40,000 books imminently, with those copyrighted books supplied by publishers expected to quickly exceed 10,000.

Because why use something already in existence when you can reinvent your very own French wheel?

Google Book Search Releases API

Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

Google says they're a nicer company because they share

The NY Times today looks at Google CEO Eric Schmidt's anti-Microsoft mindset - one that well predates his tenure at Google (he came up at Sun Microsystems, as anti a Microsoft shop as Apple):

In an interview in November, Mr. Schmidt said he understood the comparison [between the two behemoths] but that it “rankled” him.

“Microsoft was found guilty in a federal court,” he said. The big software maker, he argued, illegally maintained its Windows monopoly by stifling rivals. “Fundamentally, they blocked people from entering their ecosystem.”

“At Google,” Mr. Schmidt added, “we had a long conversation about, if we became a big company, how could we avoid that. There are a lot of technical things we can do and have done. But the one that we decided that was most important was not to trap user data. That is important because” if you can move your data from Google, “you always have a choice to go to a competitor of Google. That is absolutely not true in Microsoft’s history.”

Peter Brantley on Google

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interview with Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Foundation on the possible settlement that Google is preparing in response to lawsuits from publishers and authors. The Chronicle, unfortunately, requires a subscription for web access. But Peter Suber posts a fair-use excerpt on his website.

Google Does Library Thing

Google has added new functionality to its book search, reports PW:

Google Book Search users now have the ability to create a personal online library by clicking on a new “add to My library” link that has been added to book search results. Readers can build personal libraries of their favorite titles.

As this sounded suspiciously like Library Thing to me, I hopped over to the Library Thing blog...where they were too busy launching Wiki Thing (a wiki for their site) to even be bothered by what Google is doing.

Digital Standards

Yesterday's meeting of the Digital Standards subcommittee of BISAC was actually less fractious and more consensual than I'd anticipated. (For starters, Google and Microsoft were on the same page regarding formats - neither is particularly interested in proprietary formats, but are looking to differentiate their services with their own search capabilities once files are delivered to them.)

The committee is chaired by Kent Freeman, of Ingram Digital Group, who's found himself in a Michael Corleone-esque position regarding BISAC: "Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in!" Attendees ranged from Google/Microsoft to publishers (Random, Wiley), to service providers (Quality Solutions, FYI, Bowker, yrs truly) to distributors (Ingram). Peter Brantley of the Digital Library Federation also attended (by phone), as did Nick Bogaty of IDPF.

Essentially, Chris Hart of Random House discussed the issues he'd brought to AAP regarding digital distribution, and with his help the committee was able to divide issues into those around "discoverability" vs those around the actual content itself. Kent decided to keep us focused on discoverability and search at first, and gradually lead in to the sticky issues surrounding content delivery between trading partners.

Google presented its Book Crawl specification, which was really interesting but only in the beta-est of betas right now. All in all a terrific and informative meeting. You can join up here.

Google Book Search Gets Accessible

Google Book Search announced last week that it has added a dimension to its public domain material that allows it to be accessed by disabled readers. Some of this functionality was developed by T. V. Raman, a Google technologist who cannot see. So that's pretty cool. It's good to see Google's taking disabilities into account in their search function.

Google/CIC contract gets legs

PW reports on Peter Brantley's discovery (reported here on Thursday) that the CIC libraries' contract with Google doesn't give the libraries their own copies of in-copyright material:

The terms of the CIC deal reflect a growing change in Google's attitude toward the publishing industry. Mark Sandler, CIC director and former collection development officer at the University of Michigan University Library, pointed out that the CIC deal differs not only from Google's deal with Michigan, but from its other library partnerships as well. "I think there's just been a lot of discussion over the last two years," he said. Sandler said he didn't disagree with some of observations by fellow librarians concerning the deal, but said that, without the funds, time and staff to undertake their own major scanning efforts, CIC libraries are satisfied to have Google provide some measure of access.

Brantley Calls Out Google

And that to me is potentially the saddest loss, should such an arrangement come to be realized. Because in real terms, across this vitally important collection of humanity’s literature and thought, of all the ways of thinking about books and working with ideas on the Web, we might be left with only one way.

Google Keeps Reelin' 'Em In

Google continues its Sherman-like march with the absorption of the Community on Institutional Cooperation into its digitization project. The CIC is a consortium of 12 academic libraries - the Big 10 plus 2 more - in the Midwest. This brings the total number of Google Book Search partners up to 25.

Windows Live Search is...Live

The big news, of course, is that Microsoft's Windows Live Search is live. Cliff Guren explained all the features today, and it's very similar to Google Book Search except for this important differentiator - no scanning of books with dubious copyright status. Microsoft scans books that are out-of-copyright, and publishers submit in-copyright books for inclusion (giving their permission for scanning).

There's no cost to publishers for the service. And there's no print functionality, or even cut-and-paste functionality, in the search: "As we all know," Guren says, "hacks run amok." So expect a few wiseasses to create end-runs around the protections that Microsoft has installed.

Publishers are able to control how much of a book they want consumers to see - including blocking certain pages from view altogether (in the case of a mystery, for example), or images to which they don't have the rights.

Guren admitted that the primary reason behind Windows Live is competition with Google for "query share" - which has a heavy influence on ad revenue. Look for a Windows Live demonstration at the Crystal Palace - which sounds like a brothel but is really a section of Javits.

Google Books Asia

Cool!

And in Google news...

A federal appeals court ruled that Google is within the bounds of fair use by displaying thumbnail images in its search results. The adut site Perfect 10 (no, I will not supply a link here - find it yourselves, dears) was suing Google, saying that because its business was image-based, displaying those images was a violation of copyright law. Perfect 10 was, in essence, concerned that browsers would settle for the thumbnail images rather than clicking through and paying for the full-sized ones.

However, the court ruled in Google's favor on this one. Now the question becomes...what if Perfect 10's images are pirated by other sites? Are those thumbnails still a copyright violation, if they refer users to those pirate websites instead of (or in addition to) Perfect 10?

Probably not. But you never know how much of an understanding courts are going to have about technology issues.

Google One Step Closer to World Domination...

...at least in the search arena.

Google announced yesterday that it was combining a variety of disparate databases in search results. Users will now be able to see images, book information, and video clips on their search results pages. It's not quite completed yet, but if you go to Google today you'll notice some subtle differences. I haven't yet figured out quite how the bar below the search box (which lists a subset of the different sorts of searches you can do) differs from the bar above the search box (which lists all the different sorts of searches you can do) - but it seems to have something to do with relevancy and weight of search terms.

Google's going to keep on keeping on

Google filed a response to Viacom's lawsuit yesterday in which it stated that Viacom was basically full of it (that's a legal term) and asking for a dismissal of the suit. Says the New York Times:

Google’s court filing gives few new details of its legal thinking, which relies heavily on the so-called “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, enacted in 1998. Those provisions generally hold that Web sites’ owners are not liable for copyright material uploaded by others to their site as long as they promptly remove the material when asked to do so by the copyright owner.

Viacom's response to Google's reponse was that YouTube doesn't qualify for "safe harbor" because the operators of YouTube are fully aware that the material that gets uploaded is frequently copyrighted: "“It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site, and they are profiting from it.”