Here is something that may mean I can devote more of my discretionary income to other projects:

The Open Library

This compendium of online books features many actual scans of public domain works, many of them very hard to come by in print anymore.

One of the pleasures I have in life is reading. Picking up a book, grasping concept the author is writing about, and digesting his or her offerings, which in turn, creates knowledge, or creates dreams. Both knowledge and dreams have great value in today’s world. I found this website, and want to pass it on. To me, it is a breath of fresh air in an environment dedicated strictly to marketing a product. Unlike most online bookstores, this website is about creating a world of involvement, and is not just the purchasing a book.  Actual involvement.

The key to this doorway is the ownership of a healthy appetite for ideas and an open, inquisitive mind. Here is an online world where you can discuss, share, recommend, comment and buy, as a means of personal enrichment and fulfillment. Reading books, discussing issues and sharing ideas with other intellectual individuals across the globe is only one step away. Enter a world where you can discuss, share, and learn from the new world thinkers.

Explore, Publish and Connect

rv-visions

Here is a look at how AR works and this month’s interactive issue of Esquire magazine below.  Enjoy!

http://www.thefreelibrary.com

http://www.springer.com

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/

Citing Electronic Resources (The Internet Public Library)

Cambridge University Institute of Education Library and Resources Centre

Queen’s University Libraries (Kingston, Canada), Education Library

University of Alberta: H.T. Coutts Library

University of Hong Kong Libraries — Education Library Collections

United States:

Cubberley Education Library, Stanford University

Bridgewater State College (Textbooks)

Framingham State College (Textbooks)

Lesley University (Textbooks)

Indiana University, Bloomington, Education Library

Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College Columbia University

National Library of Education

Peabody College, Vanderbilt University Education Library

University of California, Berkeley, Education-Psychology Library

University of Florida, Education Library

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Education and Social Science Library

University of Kentucky, Education Library

University of Virginia, Education Library

Last week saw widespread observance of Open Access Week 2009 .  The week primarily focused on opening access to current research and scholarship (though there’s also been a growing community working on opening access to teaching and learning content).  You can find lots of open access resources at the Open Access Directory.

Current scholarship is not spontaneously generated from the brain or lab of the writer.  Useful scholarship must understand and interpret past work, to be effective in the present.  In many fields, and not just the classical humanities, the relevant past work may stretch back hundreds or even thousands of years.  Current scholarship and study will be more effective if its source material is also made openly accessible, and if proper attention is drawn to the most useful sources.  And now is an especially opportune time for scholars of all sorts, professional and amateur, to get involved in the process.

This may seem a strange thing to say at a time when the digitization of old books and other historic materials is increasingly dominated by large-scale projects like Google and the Internet Archive.  With mass digitizers putting millions of public domain book and journal volumes online, and with a near-term possibility of millions more copyrighted volumes going online as well, how much of a role is left for individual scholars and readers?

A very important role, as it turns out.  Mass digitization projects can quickly produce large scale aggregations of pass content, but as many have pointed out, aggregation is not the same as curation, and as aggregations grow larger, being able to find the right items in a growing collection becomes increasingly important.  That’s what curation helps us do, and the large-scale digitizers are not doing a very effective job of it themselves.  Google’s PageRank algorithm may take advantage of implicit curation of web pages (through the choices of authors’ page links), but Google and other aggregators have had a much harder time drawing attention to the most useful books, scholarly articles, or other works created without built-in hyperlinks.

Sometimes this is because they haven’t digitized them, even as they’ve digitized inferior substitutes.  Over three years after Paul Duguid lamented the republication of a bowdlerized translation of Knut Hamsun’s Pan by Project Gutenberg, that version remains the only freely available one of this book available there, or at Google Books, or anywhere else online that I’ve found.   Even though an unexpurgated version of this translation was published before the bowdlerized version, no digitizer that I know of has gotten around to finding and digitizing it; and countless readers may have used the existing online copies without even knowing that they’ve been censored.  Extra bibliographic and copyright research may be necessary to determine whether a better resource is available for digitization, as it in this case.

Sometimes the content is digitized, but can’t be found easily.  Geoff Nunberg’s post on Google Books’ “metadata train wreck” shows plenty of examples of how difficult it can be to find and properly identify a particular edition in Google Books, much less figure out which edition is the best one to use.  I’ve commented in the past about the challenges of finding multi-volume works in that corpus.  And Peter Jacso has pointed out Google’s problems indexing current scholarship.  If you can’t find the paper or book you need for your research, your work will be no better than it would be if the source had never existed.

This is where scholars can potentially play a useful role.  We don’t individually digitize books by the thousands, but we do individually find, cite, and recommend useful sources, down to the particular edition, as we find them and use them in our own writings and teaching.  These citations and recommendations now often go online, in various locations.  It would be very useful to have these recommendations made more visible, and tied to freely available online copies of the sources cited, whenever legally possible. Sometimes, we also create or digitize our own editions of past works, with useful annotations, for our classes or our own work.  It would be very useful to have these made visible and persistent as well, whenever appropriate.

I hope that large resource aggregations will make it easier for scholars and others to curate the collections to make them more useful to their readers.  In the meantime, we can start with resources we have.  For example, on The Online Books Page, my catalog entry for Hamsun’s Pan notes its limitations.  My public requests page includes information on a better edition that could be digitized, by someone who has access to the edition and has some time to spare.  And my suggestion form is ready to accept links to better editions of this book, or to other online books that merit special attention.  Indeed, most of the books that I now add to my catalog derive from submissions made by various readers on this form, and I invite scholars to suggest the freely accessible books and serials that they find most useful for my catalog.

As the Little Professor notes in a recent post, the sort of bibliographic work I’ve described can be time-consuming but vitally important for making effective use of old sources, and that work has often not been done by anyone for many books outside the usual classical canons.  Yet it’s the sort of thing that scholars do, bit by bit, as part of their everyday work.  The aggregate effect of their curation and digitization, appropriately harnessed in open-access form, could greatly improve our ability to build upon the work of the past.

Effective online books guide

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Although we don’t yet know who our fifth person will be, if we get one, after our meeting yesterday morning it looks like we’re going with the places-to-find-books idea.  We’re meeting again tomorrow with lists of ideas what kinds of places to include, which we can then categorise accordingly.

Based on our brief discussion, i’ve come up with only a few but there’s still time.

Firstly, physical book shops you buy books from:

• Ordinary book shops (Borders, Waterstones, Blackwells, places that are good for second-hand and remainders e.g. Waterstones on Gower Street, Borders on the Charing Cross Road)
• Online book shops (Amazon, publishers, bookshops’ websites)
• Second-hand book shops (Skoob, loads on Charing Cross Road, various other favourites)
• Book fairs (London’s south bank, several in Chichester where Linda lives)
• Radical book shops (Housman’s, Freedom, News From Nowhere, 56a)

I’m really keen to include second-hand and radical book shops, because these don’t appear to be all that widely mentioned.  Amazon marketplace and other well-known retailers get plenty of press already.  These other places not only are very good at providing a lot of resources you might not get elsewhere, especially more obscure items, but they also need the support.  Just as all my favourite little independent record shops shut down as i was growing up, so do these book shops because people no longer buy from them, only noticing and complaining when they no longer have the option but doing nothing about it.

An area we’ll go into that i intend to research so i can show it to the others and know what i’m talking about:

• e-books and e-readers
• free e-books such as Project Gutenberg

Then i thought we might want to include other places you wouldn’t necessarily at first think of:

• Pubs and cafes
• Book exchanges (e.g the charity one at my local station)
• bookcrossing.com and similar
• charity shops (obvious to some but not to others)

We did talk yesterday about including more stuff, like this:

• post your own reviews
• existing book review web-sites
• recommendations based on what you liked/own
• book sales at libraries
• library schemes like Bookstart

When we meet again tomorrow i’ll mention librarything.com to them because we may be able to make use of this (as in, we can point people towards it, instead of trying to include everything on our own site).

Finally i wonder if we should mention journals and e-journals too or if that would just end up getting out of hand.

Whether to put your carefully honed, obsessively slaved over and (hopefully) arresting first chapter online for the world to pick up, pick over and pick apart is a question asked by most writers these days. Copyright fears combine with the ever-present worries about your own abilities, to create quite a reasonable argument against. But just listen to the argument for: viewing chapters online has a positive impact on purchases.

According to Reuters, LibreDigital found that for one big publisher one in three of the folks browsing ended up buying the book they sampled. That’s pretty astounding.

I’m sure I’m not alone in being wary about putting short fiction online – it’s not because I’m scared about people taking it or slating it, it’s merely the fact that my online presence and audience is small and once you’ve published something on your blog it typically isn’t accepted by magazines or anthologies and therefore won’t have a chance at reaching a wider audience.

However, LibreDigital also found that the most popular books browsed online were romance novels, followed by teen/tween writing and business books. Maybe I won’t get too excited just yet. Still, it raises some interesting questions about pirated books online. I’m sure plenty of people are searching pirated versions to read a little and check whether they like the style in much the same way they would sample a few tracks from an album.

Maybe I should take these findings on board and publish a chapter online. Or maybe I should write a teen romance featuring plenty of business advice.

It would seem that posting of legal electronic copies of copyrighted books on the Internet is a good idea. Wouldn’t it be better if people could access books on virtually any topic almost immediately without leaving the comforts of their own homes? Don’t we want a smarter population?

Google Inc. does have those things in mind when it was granted rights by the Authors Guild and Association of American  Publishers to have electronic copies of their books and have them posted on their Google Books site. Google Books could then charge users for access to these e-books. But other companies, notably Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon.com, are against the deal and have even joined the Open Book Alliance, the largest organization whose purpose is to oppose the Google Books deal.

With the deal, Google could have a monopoly of e-book viewing on the Internet. Which is bad news for its main competitors, which are (not surprisingly) Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon.com. Yahoo and Microsoft  have always been second and third on the search market (Google Search could benefit from more book searches), while Amazon.com could be threatened by Google Books’ e-bookstore.

All in all, Google’s idea to have books online is a marvel one. One that could even change societies as we know it. Imagine having a library at your fingertips without having to leave your desk at home. But in the spirit of economic equity and market equality, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon.com (along with other institutions and companies) are trying to stop the Google Books settlement. Let’s just see how it works out.

IBM Redbooks added the following books to the Safari Books Online library:

	IBM System Storage DS4000 and Storage Manager V10.30 By: Sangam Racherla. Corne Lottering. Mahendran Ramasamy. Vaclav Sindelar. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	IBM FileNet P8 Platform and Architecture By: Wei-Dong Zhu. Kameron Cole. Adam Fowler. Michael Kirchner. Bruce J Mcdowell. Chuck Snow. Mike Winter. Margaret Worel. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	Tuning IBM System x Servers for Performance By: David Watts. Alexandre Chabrol. Phillip Dundas. Dustin Fredrickson. Marius Kalmantas. Mario Marroquin. Rajeev Puri. Jose Rodriguez Ruibal. David Zheng. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	Managing Unified Storage with IBM System Storage N series Operation Manager By: Alex Osuna. George Lane. Naren Rajasingam. Sudheer N Shivakumar. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	Certification Study Guide Series: IBM Maximo Asset Management V7.1 By: Vasfi Gucer. Alisson Negrisolo de Godoi. Anantaram Kandukuri. Brent Knapp. Caio Elias Saad. James Strand. Jonathan Baffa. Julio Madeira. Maamar Ferkoun. Marcel Laurenz. Shireen Ahmed. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	PowerHA for AIX Cookbook By: Scott Vetter. Shawn Bodily. Rosemary Killeen. Liviu Rosca. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	IBM WebSphere Application Server V7.0 Web Services Guide By: Henry Cui. Raymond Josef Edward A. Lara. Rosaline Makar. Nicky Moelholm. Felipe Pittella Rodrigues. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	Certification Study Guide Series: IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On 8.0 By: Axel Buecker. Azania Abebe. Benjamin Schroeter. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	DB2 9 for z/OS: Distributed Functions By: Paolo Bruni. Nisanti Mohanraj. Cristian Molaro. Yasuhiro Ohmori. Mark Rader. Rajesh Ramachandran. Publisher: IBM Redbooks
	Getting Started with WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition V7 By: Ran Gu. Martin Keen. Eugene Kuehlthau. Leonard McWilliams. David Ward. Publisher: IBM Redbooks

Here is another great blog I read that links you to an amazing tool where you can build your own book.

This could be a class project, an indiviual assignment, a gift, a dream goal.  Take a look at this site and if you think of other possibilites, let me know.

Here is another example of free technology that can be used as a teaching tool!

Check it out at Stepping Stones: Building a Book Online

Thanks so much!

When we travel to work, school or anywhere else we drive by many more signs and billboards all trying to grab our attention, minds and heart. Then there is the influence of other people with all their ideas, stories, requests and demands.

With all this filling our minds its easy to become overwhelmed. We can’t stop all the negative words from entering our minds but we can overpower them with good communication.

The teaching of God’s Holy Word will put our mental focus back on track. The question is: “When can I make this happen?”

The best solution is to start the day with a time of quiet devotional meditation. Reading or listening to the Bible and spending time in prayer. When this will not work, an alternative plan is better than nothing at all.

You can listen to an audiobook Bible. Just listen and absorb the message. Not only can this be a substitute for reading but an audiobook bible can also increase the time you spend in God’s Word. The cost of an audio Bible can be less than the cost of many printed Bibles. Getting your audio Bible delivered via the internet can reduce the costs even more.

Use your car’s cd player, a portable mp3 player, cell phone or personal organizer to listen to the Bible while you travel. It will not only improve your walk with God but also keep the worldly messages out of your thinking.

God’s Word itself speaks on the importance of hearing the message.

Revelation 3:13 – He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

Isaiah 1 :2 – Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken…

James 1:19 – Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:

It is indeed important to hear God’s message. The Bible makes this very clear. Make use of today’s technology to strengthen your walk with God. Even ten or fifteen minutes a day would be useful. You probably listen to many songs in a day. Just reducing this a few will give you all the time you need.

This modern age of technical marvels allows us to magnify our efforts. Devotional bible study has never been easier; unfortunately, the world’s messages get through with just as much ease. Conquer this influence by listening to the Bible being read for you.

You can get an audio Bible in a number of different translations. There are dramatized readings with voice actors and sound effects or versions with simple narration. Several shorter devotional audiobooks are also available. These are good because they focus on a single topic.

About the Author

About the author: Daniel Brown offers Christian Devotional Audiobooks as well as many other audiobooks at NIV Dramatized Complete Audio Bible.

I love having the world at my finger tips. The Internet provides all sorts of information on any topic that you can think of. But is this so called information legit?

I am a book person at heart. I love going to the library and doing research. There is a certain ambiance that the library generates that promotes reading. Gone are the days of the card catalogs as computers make their way into the structural fabric of the library.

Whereas the library can weed out the crap, it is a little more difficult to do so with the Internet. I was amazed to see that the Storm Front’s Martin Luther King Jr. site was the second search result from Google. Researchers beware. It’s easy to tell if a book is not up to standards, but the web is a bit trickery. I think it is important to teach kids how to separate the good from the bad. Websites like Wikipedia are great for quick information, but you would never want to use it for a paper.  Google again amazes with the Scholar feature. What will they think of next!

In the future, it would be nice to have libraries on the web. I know that the University of Pennsylvania has a collection of books online that is free to all. It would be nice to do research at home or off site and have all the resources that a library would have. Devices like the iphone and kindle are slowly filling the gap, but there still needs to be more of a push for online books to be pushed to the mainstream. Time will tell…

Project title: IT based on UNIX MacOSX
Time to complete: 1998 – 2009

Project details: Small factory in Black Forest with a staff of 20. Doing plastic molding and CNC machining. Started our IT on an SGI Workstation serving SSH-Terminals on Macs. Ported IT to MacOSX in 2002, to MacOSXServer in 2009. Programmed in ANSI-C, SQLite, Applescript. Simple text dialog via SSH yet integrates all great graphic features/programs of MacOSX! Comprises of intelligent warehouse management, parts list, production/machine planning, document management, project management, billing, attendance recording, cnc-programming. Simple, slim yet powerful, too often put SAP-Users in amazement.
Resources used: Books on C, SGI-Docs, Apple-Docs, many many O’Reilly publications.
Parties involved: Many and many ideas from my co-workers in production, I did the coding, also my son starting in 2008.

Any other details you would like us to know: We have great fun.
What do you read?: OReilly: MacOSX for UNIX geeks, OReilly: C in a Nutshell, OReilly: Sed & Awk, OReilly: Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, OReilly: Learning the bash Shell, Apress: The Definetive Guide to SQLite LateX for Dummies

Please use the star rating system available in “leave a comment” to vote for this submission.
Deadline is September 30, 2009.

This month’s Land, Sea and Air Educator Newsletter from Sea World focuses on the ocean.  Included are links to classroom activities by grade, from K-8; a PowerPoint presentation available for classroom use; a selection of online animal infobooks that contain a range of information about several marine mammals and ecosystems; a series of online FunGuides that explore underwater habitats;  and links to more.  Read Land Sea and Air

I was looking for how-to manuals for Microsoft Access recently when I discovered that UCSF has licensed a database called Safari Books Online
” over 8,000 vetted learning and reference resources from leading publishers like O’Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley, Peachpit Press, Apress, Manning and Talented Pixie”

The collection focuses on computer technology and also includes graphic design, and business management titles. You can browse by category or search for books on everything from Adobe Photoshop to Unix. From the Safari website: http://search.safaribooksonline.com/home, you can read and even download chapters from any computer on the UCSF network or thorough your VPN@UCSF remote access account.

You can also find links to these online books by searching the UCSF Library catalog by keyword. Example: search keyword ‘photoshop’ – look for [electronic resource] in your search results. You can also search by title and use the option on the results page to limit your search to “Online Books”

Now, I really have no excuse not to learn how to use Photoshop.

With the recent closing down of the message board, I am currently going through tens of thousands of posts in an effort to save important information that will be of use to me … and to you.

This morning, I came across an extensive list of books that can be read online that I simply could not delete – not after all the work that went into creating it. Of course, I am not sure if all the links are still valid, but my link checker plugin will quickly do that job for me. Broken links will be shown as if a line has been struck through them and I will check and fix or check and delete those ones in due course.

The list can be found on the Library page, under Jamie Lauren’s A to Z Online Library Links.

I am also transferring a list of comic strip lists to the Library page for your enjoyment, which was also created by Jamie Lauren – Jamie Lauren’s A to Z Online Daily Comic Strip Links.

Exclusive Content Sneak Peek for Safari Books Online Subscribers.

While the rest of the world waits until October 2009, Safari subscribers can begin reading The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, 5th Anniversary Edition now!

Five years ago, at the Bottom of the Pyramid, by C.K. Prahalad, showed companies how they could reignite profits and growth by serving the world’s five billion poorest people. Hundreds of firms have successfully taken that path — building large, profitable businesses that are reducing poverty and eliminating human misery at the same time.

Now, Prahalad has updated his extraordinary book to reflect the lessons of the past five years: business-building strategies, techniques, and innovations proven to work in emerging markets. The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: doing well by doing good or doing good by doing well!

Prahalad, who was named #1 in the Thinkers’ 50 survey conducted by The Times, updates his book to give readers a picture of how this idea is being implemented in poor regions around the world.

• How to serve the world’s poorest people and still make a profit
• New strategies and tactics for building winning businesses in today’s
  emerging markets
• New bottom of the pyramid trends in technology, healthcare, consumer
  goods, finance, and beyond
• Insights from top CEOs succeeding in emerging markets
• New and updated case studies — from Reuters’ data services for farmers
  to Jaipur Rugs’ revolutionary supply chain

Learn more

In my previous post, I worried that the Google Books settlement might fall apart in the face of opposition from influential parties like the Copyright Office, and that such a collapse might deprive the public of meaningful access to millions of out of print books.

Not everyone sees it that way.  I’ve seen various suggestions of alternatives to the settlement for making these books available.  In this post, I’ll describe some of the suggested alternatives, explain why they don’t seem to me as likely to succeed on their own, and discuss how some of them could still go forward under a settlement.

Compulsory licenses

Both the Open Book Alliance’s court filings and the Copyright Office’s testimony mention the possibility of compulsory licensing, which essentially lets people use a copyrighted work without getting permission, provided that they meet standard conditions determined by the government.  Compulsory licenses already exist in certain areas, such as musical performances and broadcasts.  If I want to cover a Beatles song on my new record, I can, as long as meet some basic conditions, including paying a standard royalty.  The (remaining) Beatles can’t hold out for a higher rate, or say that no one else is allowed to cover the recordings they’ve released.

The Google Books settlement has some similarities to a compulsory license, but with some important differences, including:

1. Book rightsholders can choose to deny public uses of their work, or hold out for higher compensation, which they generally can’t do under a compulsory license regime. (They have to explicitly request this, though.  So it’s really what one might call a “default” license.)
2. The license has been negotiated through a court settlement rather than Congressional action. (This was one of the main complaints of the Copyright Office.)
3. The license given in the settlement is granted only to Google, not to other digitizers. (This has justifiably raised monopoly concerns.)

I do have a problem with the last difference as it stands.  I’d like to see the license widened so that anyone, not just Google, could digitize and make available out of print books under the same terms as Google. But there are various ways we can get to that point from the settlement.  The Book Rights Registry created by the settlement could extend Google-like rights to anyone else under the same terms, as the settlement permits them to do.  The Justice Department could require them to do so as part of an antitrust supervision.  Or Congress could decide to codify the license to apply generally.  (They’ve done this sort of thing before with fair use and the first sale doctrine, both of which originated in the courts.)

If the settlement falls apart, though, negotiation over an appropriate license has to start over from scratch, and has to persuade Congress to loosen copyrights for benefits they might not clearly see. As I suggested in my previous post, Congress’ recent tendencies have heavily favored tightening, rather than loosening, copyright control.   And I haven’t yet seen a strong coalition pushing for laws granting compulsory (or default) licenses that are as broad as would be needed.

For instance, the Open Books Alliance’s amicus brief suggests the possibility of a compulsory license, but only as “but one approach”, and that suggestion seems as much aimed at getting hold of Google’s scans as licensing the book copyrights themselves.  Their front page at present shows no explicit advocacy of compulsory copyright licenses.  Perhaps they will unite behind a workable Google Books-style compulsory license proposal in the future, but I’m not counting on that.  (Update: Just after I posted this, I saw this statement of principles go up on the OBA site.  We’ll see what develops from that.)

The Copyright Office’s congressional brief also mentions but tries to damp down the idea.  It repeatedly characterizes compulsory licensing as something that Congress only does “reluctantly” and “in the face of marketplace failure”. But despite its strong words on other subjects, it does not appear concerned over whether we in fact have a marketplace failure around broad access to out-of-print books.

Orphan works legislation

The Copyright Office filing also suggests passing orphan works legislation (as have various other parties, including Google).  An orphan works limitation on copyrights would be nice, but it’s not going to enable the sort of large, comprehensive historical corpus that the Google Books settlement would allow.

As Denise Troll Covey has pointed out, the orphan works certification requirements recommended in last year’s bill, like many other case-by-case copyright clearance procedures, are labor-intensive and slow, and may be legally risky.  (In particular, the overhead for copyright clearance, not including license payment, can be several times the cost of digitization.)  Hence, these methods are not likely to scale well.  And they would not cover the many out-of-print books that aren’t, strictly speaking, orphans.  I don’t consider it likely that a near-comprehensive library  of millions of out-of-print 20th century books will come about by this route alone any time soon.

Even so, despite its limited reach, last year’s orphan works legislation was stopped in Congress after some creator organizations objected to it.  Some of the objectors, including the  National Writers Union and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, are now members of  the Open Book Alliance, which makes me wonder how effectively that group would act as a united coalition for copyright reform.

Private negotiation

Some critics suggest that Google and other digitizers simply negotiate with each rightsholder, or a mediator designated by each  rightsholder.   It’s possible that this actually might work for many future books, if authors and publishers set up comprehensive clearinghouses (like ASCAP and Harry Fox mediate music licensing).  If new books get registered with agents like these going forward, with simple, streamlined digital rights clearing, private arrangement could work well for future books both in-print and out-of-print.  Indeed, Google’s default settlement license privileges don’t apply to new books from 2009 onward.

But it’s much less likely that this will be a practical solution to build a comprehensive collection of past out of print books from the 20th and early 21st century, because of the sheer difficulty and cost of determining and locating all the current rightsholders of books long out of print.   The friction involved in such negotiation (involving high average cost for low average compensation) is too great.  Without the settlement and/or legal reform, we risk having what James Boyle called a “20th century black hole” for books.

Copyright law reform

As James Boyle points out, it would solve a lot of the problems that keep old books  in obscurity if books didn’t get exceedingly long copyrights purely by default.  It would also help if fair use and public domain determination weren’t as risky as they are now. I’d love to see all that come to pass, but no one I know that’s knowledgeable on copyright issues is holding their breath waiting for it to happen any time soon.

Moving forward

As I’ve previously mentioned, the settlement is imperfect.  It may well need antitrust supervision, and future elaboration and extension.  (And I’ve suggested some ways that libraries and others can work to improve on it.)  It’s still the most promising starting point I’ve seen for making comprehensive, widely usable, historic digital book collections possible.  I hope that we get the chance to build on it, instead of throwing away the opportunity.  In any case, I’d be happy to hear people’s thoughts and comments about the best way to move forward.

The Google Books settlement fairness hearing is still a few weeks away, but in the last few weeks the deal has been talked and shouted about with ever-higher volume.  Still, it wasn’t until the other day, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing where US Copyright Register Marybeth Peters came loaded for bear, that I started thinking there was a significant likelihood that the settlement might fall apart.

There are a number of people in different communities, including libraries, who hope this  happens.   I’m not one of them.  I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t comment with authority on whether the settlement is sound law.  But I’m quite confident that it advances good policy.  In particular, it’s one of the best feasible opportunities to bring a near-comprehensive view of the knowledge and culture of the 20th and early 21st centuries into widespread use.  And I worry that, should the settlement break down, we will not have another opportunity like it any time soon.  The settlement has flaws, like the Google Books Project itself has, but at the same time, like Google Books itself, the deal the settlement offers is incredibly useful to readers, while also giving writers new opportunities to revive, and be paid for, their out of print work.

The potential

Under the status quo, millions of books are greatly under-utilized.  It isn’t just that people don’t have easy access to them; it’s that people don’t know that particular books useful to them exist in the first place.  I work in a library that has collected millions of volumes, many of which are hardly ever checked out. Not only would Google’s expanded books offerings give our users access to millions more books, but it would also make millions of books that we already own easier for our users to find and use effectively.

Want to know what books make mention of a particular event, ancestor, or idea?  With existing libraries, and good search skills, you might be able to find books, if any, that are written primarily about those things. But you’ll probably miss much other information on those same topics, information in works that are primarily about something else.  With expanded search, and the ability to preview old book content, it could be much easier to get a more comprehensive view on a topic, and find out which books are worth obtaining for learning more.

And if that’s a big advance for people in big universities like ours, it’s an even bigger step forward for people who have not had easy access to big research libraries.  Once a search turns up a book of interest, Google Books would offer a searcher various ways of getting that book: buying online access; reading it at their library’s computer (either via a paid subscription, or via a free public access terminal); buying a print copy; or getting an inter-library loan.  These options all involve various trade-offs of cost and convenience, as is the case with libraries today.  While one could wish for better tradeoff terms, the ones proposed still represent big advances from what one can easily do today.

And as with other large online collections like Wikipedia or WorldCat, or the Web as a whole, the advantages to large book corpuses like Google’s aren’t just in the individual items, but in what can be done with the aggregation.  I don’t know exactly what new kinds of things people will find to do with a near-comprehensive collection of  20th century books, but having seen all that people have done with other information aggregated on the Internet, I’m confident that there would be many great uses found, large and small.

The peril

If the Google settlement does fall apart, are we likely to see any collection like the one it envisions any time soon?  I’m not at all confident we will.  The basic problem is that, without some sort of blanket license, it’s impractical (and in the case of true orphan works, currently impossible) to clear all the copyrights that would be required to build such a collection.  This represents a failure in copyright law.  Instead of “promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts”, as the Constitution requires, current US copyright law effectively keeps millions of out-of-print books in obscurity, not producing significant benefits either to their creators or to their potential users.

The current proposed Google Books settlement is, among other things, an attempt to get around this failure.  If the settlement fails, would the parties make a new agreement that would allow a readable collection of millions of post-1922 online books?  The divergence in the complaints I’ve seen (for instance, on one hand that the collection would cost readers too much, and on another hand that it would pay writers too little) suggest the difficulty of coming to a new consensus that satisfies all the parties, if negotiations have to start again from scratch.  And, if the arguments of the Copyright Office and some of the other parties carry the day, even if such an agreement were reached, the agreement could not be ratified by a court anyway.  Instead, it would require acts of Congress, and maybe even re-negotiations of international treaties.

Based on past history, there are two things that would make the government likely to reform copyright law to permit mass reuse of out-of-print books.  Ether there needs to be a clear example of the benefits of such a reform, or there needs to be a strong coalition pushing for such a reform.  Clear examples have usually come from businesses that are actually in operation; for example, the player piano roll industry that successfully persuaded Congress to streamline music copyright clearance in the previous century (or the Betamax that persuaded a slender majority of the Supreme Court to declare the VCR legal).

If the proposed Google Books library service goes online, even under a flawed initial settlement, it too could provide a compelling example to encourage general copyright reform.  But without such an example, it can be hard to move Congress to act.   It’s easy to undervalue the opportunities you don’t clearly see.

What about a strong coalition pushing for a reform in the law that would let anyone create the comprehensive online collections of out of print books I’d described?  I’d like to see one, but I haven’t yet.  (Yes, there’s the Open Book Alliance, but its members don’t seem to be distinctly allied in anything particular other than objecting to the settlement.)  In my next post, I’ll discuss reforms that might do the job, and the reasons I believe they would be difficult to enact without the settlement.

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