<p>How do you feel about the advent of Internet book digitization (particularly Google Books)?</p>
<p>So far, Google has digitized roughly 15% of all the books ever written. Do you think that digitizing all of the books in the world and making them searchable is a good idea? </p>
<p>In other words, do you think that it will contribute to the progress and improvement of mankind? What concerns do you have about this massive project? </p>
<p>A project like this is unprecedented.</p>
<p>I think it is a great idea, as long as they have the best translators.
Books should be accessible to all.
But I am a bigger supporter of Project Gutenberg.</p>
<p>I’m in third heaven that I live in a day and age with the ability to even attempt such a project and people thinking that it is a worthy goal. I spent my early youth in the library when “research skills” were valued by teachers. i spent more time trying to find the information I wanted to know than learning anything from it. I marvel that so much is at our fingertips today. Now I only wonder how much information a student (young or old) can take in and properly process to be put to good use.</p>
<p>Given that my local libraries toss books like mad, I’m thrilled that books are being digitized. My local library got rid of half their fantasy collection the year before Harry Potter became a bestseller and all those other fantasy authors suddenly were in vogue again.</p>
<p>One thing that concerns me is that they could start to change the books as they see fit. There would be no mass record of the text before it was changed. Like Big Brother did in the book 1984. When they wanted to change history, it only took a few keystokes. Didn’t they want to tinker with Huckleberry Finn recently?</p>
<p>S and I were talking about this recently. The only concern is that they should not do away with the actual books, as some future civilization conceivably do nothing with a bunch of disks if there were nothing to play them on (think 8-track tapes, wth would you do upon finding a cache of them?). Books could always be deciphered. CD’s not so much.</p>
<p>I seriously do not see a downside to this. I think any “potential” downside is far outweighed by the benefits.</p>
<p>I do 2nd not doing away with the print books. But think of how much more knowledge we would have had if the Library of Alexandria hadn’t been destroyed- if somehow that information could have survived “digitally”.</p>
<p>TR, you always ask questions and never offer any input- what do YOU think of this?</p>
<p>romanigypsyeyes,</p>
<p>I’m glad that you asked my opinion.</p>
<p>I’m very excited about Internet book digitization projects. I think that it’s a brilliant initiative, especially since most books are out-of-print, and many books are hard to find. </p>
<p>Yet, I think that the courts, the author’s guild, and public interest groups should keep a close eye on all book digitization projects to ensure that:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>No company engages in anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. In other words, other companies (if they wanted to) should be able to also do what Google has done and at the same scale.</p></li>
<li><p>Authors of books with live copyrights are fairly compensated</p></li>
<li><p>Orphan works are treated fairly. If Google does profit from an orphan work, a portion of the proceeds should be donated to charity–perhaps a charity that helps struggling new authors or a charity that builds libraries in third-world countries</p></li>
<li><p>Noble ideals (such as expanding access to knowledge and bettering mankind), not solely profit, should chiefly motivate all book digitization efforts. I don’t take issue with companies profiting (if they fairly compensate authors). However, I think that noble ideals, not money, should be the main motivator.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I have other thoughts.</p>
<p>I love it. But I want to ensure that writers are compensated.</p>
<p>I buy Kindle versions of a particular author’s books. These books could probably be pirated quite easily and maybe they are but they are inexpensive to me and I get a lot of enjoyment out of them. Amazon seems to have a good thing here: inexpensive E-books with a fair return to the author - lower costs = lots of sales.</p>
<p>This is different from putting existing stuff online though. That would be nice for the consumer and researcher, as long as creative rights are honored. I pay for the books that I read because more books wouldn’t be written if the author wasn’t paid.</p>
<p>I think that musicians have this problem right now - there’s so much piracy of their product that they have to make a lot of money doing live shows.</p>
<p>I have a Campbell’s Biology and I’d like to read through it. I just hate the idea of taking the thing to work to read in my spare time. There’s a digital version but it’s $95 and I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it to me. I’d love to just trade the textbook for the digital version.</p>
<p>So good idea, yes. Just make sure that those that own IP rights get compensation.</p>
<p>I agree with the points made by the other posters here, but as long as it can be done with consideration for everyone’s rights and IP, I think it’s a great idea.</p>
<p>To me, the greatest benefit may be that the books will be searchable. A searchable document is a much more useful document than one that isn’t searchable, and I’m looking forward to more books having this marvelous benefit.</p>
<p>yes, so we’ll save them all for posterity in the post-apocalyptic Fahrenheit 451 world-- just kidding…</p>
<p>One of daughter’s textbooks is available in hardcover and Kindle this semester. I’ve asked her which one she wants. The Kindle version is about $10 cheaper and would mean a lighter backpack load. I’m guessing Kindle but we’ll see.</p>
<p>BC, I had purchased a Kindle with the sole intent of filling it with textbooks for references, etc. I personally have not found it to be all that suitable in that fashion yet…</p>
<p>Using it for reference is different from using it for a course and the Kindle version would allow her to view her textbook on her phone, our tablets, her laptop or her desktop (I think that they allow up to five devices). At any rate, I’ll leave it up to her.</p>
<p>hops_scout–most e-readers and tablets do not have the capability to fully support textbooks. The Nook Study program, however, is a PC/Mac based program designed for textbooks. It’s a handy little program where you can make your own study guides from text you highlight, flash cards, it will annotate any quotes from the textbook you are using for a paper, etc. If you want to use your computer for textbooks, check into that program. It’s free to download.</p>
<p>Amazon has a preview for Kindle textbooks and I just loaded the preview onto my Nexus 7. I played around with it for a few minutes. BTW, it won’t download to a phone - only tablets. I didn’t try it on a PC.</p>
<p>The 7 inch tablet isn’t really good for viewing textbooks in portrait mode unless you want to zoom in but this can be a pain because you have to make adjustments before reading the page. Reading is fine in landscape mode.</p>
<p>I suspect that it would look a lot better on an Retina iPad or other HD display compared to the lower-resolution displays found on inexpensive small tablets. I’ll show my daughter the sample (it’s about 60 pages of the book which is quite generous) and see what she thinks. I think that it would look fine on a laptop.</p>
<p>Color, images, etc. are fine.</p>
<p>Many universities are also digitizing their collections- it takes financial support from somewhere.</p>
<p>I read that the Google plan is not to continue to offer access for free. That, once some bulk is reached, all that easy access today will be restricted.</p>
<p>@lookingforward</p>
<p>From where did you read that?</p>
<p>It’s been a while. Here’s one link: [Singularity</a> Law Google Stares Down Book Industry: Publishers Blink, Google Book Search Wins](<a href=“http://singularitylaw.com/technology-law/internet-e-commerce-law/google-stares-down-book-industry-publishers-blink-google-book-search-wins]Singularity”>http://singularitylaw.com/technology-law/internet-e-commerce-law/google-stares-down-book-industry-publishers-blink-google-book-search-wins)</p>
<p>I can’t imagine the mighty G doing this “for us.”</p>
<p>I adore the college digitizations, btw. U of F, eg, is digitizing many of the historical holdings (incl academic research and the photog archives) I needed for some personal research. Amazing. UVA is doing some. It’s more than just the matter of published books.</p>
<p>My attitude is it depends on whose livelihood we’re destroying.</p>
<p>If it’s middlemen, fine. Businesses rise and fall. I have no problem crushing the publishing companies who sell subscriptions to valuable research materials. Or crushing textbook publishers who charge obscene amounts. </p>
<p>But content creators need to be paid. If I write something, if I make something, I want to be paid. Too much of the conversation about books goes down the line of music and then your actual work product as a company, meaning rampant pilfering of innovation. Music isn’t “meant to be free” as many say; it’s just easy to steal it in digital form. Same with books: easy to steal in digital form doesn’t mean “books are meant to be free”. </p>
<p>As to the level of compensation, that is determined not only by theft but more complicated processes that stretch over time. If you can’t get paid for writing, why write? And what do we lose if you don’t write? The value in research journals is the material they carry is peer-reviewed. Get rid of that and we have ample demonstration that dreck will be the way of the world. People have an incentive to produce work worthy of being in good journal because that means they’ve succeeded, because that is an accomplishment, because that helps the career, etc. Take that away and why bother? We already know the way to stand out in the crowd of utter nonsense: be outrageous, tell lies, market the superficial. We don’t need more of that.</p>
<p>We’ve even seen the rise recently of funded venture capital that purposely flouts the law. One example of many is Uber. It’s against the law to run your own car as a taxi in many places and they simply decided to ignore that. We see a number of companies whose business requires tricking people into allowing access to personal tracking. Why? Other than the crassness of greed, they push the idea that the market says we should have access to anything we can get, that the ability to do is tantamount to the right to do. Think about that. What would John Lennon say? “Everything you can steal can be stolen. All you need is love, love, love.”</p>
<p>Back when shareware started, a simple business model came into being. It was called: steal the app and put your name on it. That model thrives now - especially for Android stuff - but now we’re seeing people justify theft in the name of openness: I can do it so therefore I have a right to do it. If I didn’t have a right to do it, I wouldn’t be able to do it.</p>
<p>As for historic holdings, I’m all for digitizing. The quality needs to be better. I spent some time over the weekend looking at old Economist issues for how they have presented certain conflicts over time. It’s fascinating to read for a bunch of reasons, including the rather sad fact that each time any conflict comes up they offer the same blather about being reasonable we hear all the time when reason is in short supply. (If we could only hear how stupid we sound.) But the images - and they are images - often are warped because they seem to have been laid on a copier. </p>
<p>But I worry about digitizing for another reason that may surprise people, if anyone bothers to read this note. We are used to thinking we know when we don’t actually know. We know very little about the past and we tend to present things as if “this is the way it happened”. The more we digitize the more it becomes obvious how little we can render the past. That empowers people to slice it any way they want and that leads to a lot of nonsense. </p>
<p>This isn’t a new problem. I picked up a well-reviewed history of the bomb years ago and was shocked to realize he hadn’t referred at all to some of the most well-known primary and secondary sources. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t fit his needs. Maybe he didn’t want to look like he was piggy-backing. Maybe he did a bad job. So the truth is you can read and read and think you know and you won’t: you’ll know what you think you know unless you change your mind. I sometimes think we were better off not knowing, but that becomes too much like John Stuart Mill and that is unbearable.</p>