Open Library Goes Online With Public Domain Books 103
mrcgran writes "A competitor to Google Book Search emerges as the Yahoo-backed Open Content Alliance launches an 'open library' of its own. After several years of scanning and archiving, the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance this week unveiled the Open Library, their attempt at bringing public domain books to the masses. The Internet Archive has hosted texts for quite some time, but the Open Library makes fully-searchable, high-quality scans of books available, along with downloadable PDFs. It offers an experience designed to match paper: there's even a page-flipping animation as readers move forward and backward through the book. Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that when it comes to presentation, 'they already have Google beat, even with recent upgrades to the [Google Book Search] system including a plain text viewing option.'" We have previously discussed this project, though this is a bit more complete rundown on the initiative.
The real, fundamental problems (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:The real, fundamental problems (Score:4, Funny)
Remind me not to borrow your Nokia 770.
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Moon Books for DS (Score:4, Interesting)
What is bookr? (Score:1)
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An alarmingly high number of people have been caught printing their paperless free books and have been sued by Greenpeace.
Nothing incoming (Score:4, Insightful)
Where I can donate my real books to a library and they'll happily accept them, I can't donate anything to Open Library unless I own the full copyrights.
Exhaustion of distribution right after first sale (Score:5, Informative)
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Most do loan those items out. But they pay for them first. And don't make a new duplicate for each patron.
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Re:Nothing incoming (Score:4, Interesting)
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There is enough stuff written before this madness started to last a lifetime. After that there is only another 60 years to go
Re:Nothing incoming (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright is just like gmail storage: they just keep on expanding.
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Outside of reading for entertainment, book A isn't a substitute for book B.
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*shatter*
That's--that's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was, was all the time I needed... ! It's not fair!
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(Besides which, I think copyright got extended to 120 years now, not 60; it's 60 until Mickey Mouse comes out of copyright -- if something was published in your lifetime, the way the laws have been bastardized, you won't live to see it go into the public domain.)
Re:Nothing incoming - until 2019 (Score:1)
The current US laws have extended the existing copyright to 95 years after copyright registration, and 1923 is the first year that is not currently public domain, so we only have to wait 12 years, not 60, assuming the Mouse is unable to buy enough votes in Congress again.
Other countries have death+50 or death+70 copyright term laws, so they have new works becoming public domain every year. There are some Project Gutenberg affiliates in these countries, so they have books that can't be hosted by Project G
Write some books (Score:3, Insightful)
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_
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Why not?
Even in the best case scenario where the artist owns his or her work, long copyright terms reduce the pressure for the artist to continue to create. In reality, companies hold most of the copyrights and profit off them with little or no compensation for
Re:Write some books (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the old stuff I can't find ANYWHERE else that interests me about the Open Library project. Obscure? Maybe now, but not necessarily in its day. And regardless, that doesn't mean it should be thrown on the scrapheap of history. What is ignored today may well be tomorrow's classic.
Oh, there's already Project Gutenburg? A commendable project, and all well and good for plain text. But what about stuff like the very first book I ever looked at from the Open Library
The big advantage of such projects is that if enough people worldwide make copies for their personal archives, that's a hedge against the material being lost (via natural disaster, civil disorder, or whatever). We don't have to suffer another burning of the Library at Alexandria -- we have the means to spread preserved copies far and wide. Let's take advantage of that, not denigrate the archivists' efforts.
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Outside of the collective political loss of human life that continues to present day, the burning of the Library at Alexandria is arguably mankind's next greatest tragedy. There is really no justification to equate the loss of 19th c. pop dime novels or anything else to it.
Hey... (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't wait until all printed books have been scanned into public sites. I'm really into arcane mythology and religion and it is very hard to find original sources, and when you do you can't even check them out because they are so old!
From TFA... (Score:1)
"There's even a page-flipping animation"
That's it, I'm sold now.
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Does it include audio of rustling paper for every turn of the page?-) *shudder*
Gutenberg Project (Score:4, Interesting)
Apples and Oranges (Score:3, Informative)
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With my second being 'will they support downloading in
Attractive? (Score:2)
Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] has been in the business of hosting public domain books and other literary works for many years, long before either Google or this new thing.
True, a Gutenberg release preserves the text. But don't too many existing Gutenberg releases change the typesetting and remove pictures? Even those that do have illustrations, such as #8789 "Hell" from Divine Comedy by Dante [gutenberg.org], need a new coat of CSS badly.
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The original policy of Project Gutenberg may have been to only accept text-only versions, but they've been accepting alternate formats from content producers for some time. In the last couple years, it's been the policy of Distributed Proofreaders [pgdp.net], the largest provider of new material for PG, to produce an HTML edition if the original edition contains illustrations.
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The majority of their stuff is the scanned image sets, which dovetails nicely with DP and PG, in that it can be converted into a nicely proofed set of text by the folks over there (www.pgdp.net). Scans are pretty and useful in their way, but having the proofed text mak
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You could stop complaining and actually go try it, you know. It is free.
The page flipping thing is pretty instantaneous. Backwards and forwards.
Gutenberg is the raw text. This is actual scans of the pages, incl illustrations. Looks far more like a real book.
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Check out the demo site (Score:4, Interesting)
Printed texts are not going away (Score:1)
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Real-world metaphors and Interface design (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I kind of like this, page-turning animation and all.
Maybe it's because it's intended to display scans of actual books, and so having them mimic the actual books they're based on makes sense. Plus the addition of search capability is something that a real book doesn't have, but it uses the tools available as an on-line application. I also like the subtle things, like the thickness of the pages on either side changing, so you can judge your position in the book, and the little tabs that help you find your search terms.
It's making me re-think my stance on real-world metaphors in an on-line setting.
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I think the problem is usually a combination of 2 things...bad metaphors implemented badly.
A well chosen and suitable metaphor combined with quality execution usually seems to work well.
In this case, the metaphor is sound: Present the user with a book to...read a book. Good metaphor. Next is the execution, which is very good. Click a page...page turns. Very intuitive. Page flipping animation makes it totally obvious what is happening, whether flipping back or forward. Stacked page th
Bad design. (Score:2)
Actu
Booo! (Score:3, Funny)
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Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
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Translation... (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, the group trying to tie up Google in the courts is off doing something very similar on it's own. Typical outcomes for such efforts is to plod along offering competition to the product being litigated and in the process try to make the venture unprofitable for the target organization. Once case is settle out of court (or in) competi
Re:Translation... (Score:5, Informative)
As for searching, the text of the books is indexed and searchable, if you want to do a general search inside the book, you can use google, who usurps the rights of the authors, or you could use Amazon who only surfaces the texts that the rights owners have allowed to be indexed.
BTW A major coder for google while it was google.stanford.edu, was writing much of that code while working for Brewster at Alexa. There are rumors about the cleanliness of that code, but Brewster was never concerned about any of this, nor the fact that egroups, which started on another machine on the Alexa network, sold to Yahoo for $500 Million.
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As I've said before, I really like the Open Library project... but as someone down below points out, the one thing it really lacks is some evident way to search for titles and authors, or to simply browse the collection. The page with the cover graphics is visually interesting, but not real useful if you want to randomly browse or search for titles/authors.
The other thing that I found a bit lacking, was a quick way to locate the downloadables (zipped flipbook, text, etc.)
Is predates the google project (Score:5, Informative)
That's Dumb (Score:2)
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If not....pick one and go read a few pages. The page turning ani does not get in the way, nor is it hitting you over the head. Click/flip. Since this is a scan of the actual book, the animation pretty well represents the actual feel of the book. Or as close as you can get onscreen. I've tried reading books on the computer that were mere straight text copies, and this feels far better. (Not that I like reading novels tied to the computer)
unless you have one very, very, very lon
Public Domain Books Only? (Score:1)
Like Reins For Cars (Score:4, Insightful)
A book has the wonderful property that it is easy to flip back and forth between pages. It's easy to estimate where you are/were in a book by the thickness of the remaining pages in your hand. You can perform what amounts to a binary search for a specific page with minimum of fuss. None of these are yet true with books displayed on a computer. However, computers can search the entire book in an instant, combine complex boolean expressions and display snippets from each result. A good book interface should play to these strengths.
Unfortunatly this interface doesn't manage to do this. While quite pretty the page animations make flipping through pages quickly even harder than normal on a computer. The search interface doesn't let you see all the results at once nor do I see any options for a more complex kind of search. However, I really like the tabs on the side of the book that give a sense of where in the book the results are located. That should just be combined with a flat list of results.
Of course reasons of cost and time mean that it is easier to present books in their original form but in 10-15 years this is going to look as silly as the early cars that offered reins instead of steering wheels.
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A book has the wonderful property that it is easy to flip back and forth between pages. It's easy to estimate where you are/were in a book by the thickness of the remaining pages in your hand. You can perform what amounts to a binary search for a specific page with minimum of fuss. None of these are yet true with books displayed on a computer.
Which is what interests me about the iPhone and similar technologies because they make such feedback available. The speed of the flip of your finger can be used to estimate the number of page turns you want. Actually it offers more feedback because if you suddenly see what you are looking for then you can just stop and maybe scroll a bit up.
Open duplicate (Score:2)
Congratulations on the world's first publicly disclosed open source dupe!
is this DRMed? (Score:1)
All I get is blank pages with a few non-working links. But then I only turn on scripting for kiddie sites and porn sites.
Why must I turn on javascript to read a book? I assume that it has something to do with lawyers and IP matters, but I hope someone can explain another reason that plain old HTML or text won't work. Deep inside I suspect that like many other content sites (YooToub) you can upload all you want, but you can't download.
Gutenberg has always suited me. Books I want to read don't have pictures a
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swell wrote as part of a post:
A reason I can see for formatting a book this way is to preserve the actual look of the original book, including the fonts and illustrations. That is something
Help the Internet Archive w/reCAPTCH (Score:1)
-snarkbot
OpenLibrary.org web site a poor effort (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll do far better with Project Guttenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [gutenberg.org] has thousands of books, and (WOW!) the ability to search by author or title. If only OpenLibrary.org had thought of that...
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