Stanford will eliminate textbooks at all colleges

College Search & Lists
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<p>Stanford will digitize it’s library through collarboration with Google. Someday, paper books will be a thing of the past since you can download any type of literature you want just like songs and movies. </p>

<p>Instead of buying textbooks, you could probably download them through a P2P. YAY!</p>

<p>"Stanford University today announced an ambitious plan to cooperate with Google Inc. in digitizing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books from the shelves of Stanford libraries and making them available to readers worldwide and without charge.</p>

<p>“This is a great leap forward,” said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University Librarian, and publisher of both the Stanford University Press and the HighWire Press (Stanford’s online co-publishing service for scholarly journals). “We have been digitizing texts for years now to make them more accessible and searchable, but with books, as opposed to journals, such efforts have been severely limited in scope for both technical and financial reasons. The Google arrangement catapults our effective digital output from the boutique scale to the truly industrial. Through this program and others like it, Stanford intends to promote learning and to stimulate innovation.”</p>

<p>Stanford will provide books from its library collections to Google, which will operate scanning facilities and create searchable digital page images. Books will not be disbound or otherwise harmed in the digitization process. Once digitized, the books will be returned to Stanford and re-shelved. Stanford sees this as an opportunity to provide a public good that also strengthens the core mission of the university.</p>

<p>Today’s announcement is an expansion of Google’s publisher-focused Google Print program, which aims to make books and other offline information searchable online. Google is also working with several other major research libraries to digitally scan their collections and over time will integrate this content into the Google index.</p>

<p>“Even before we started Google, we dreamed of making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize to be searchable online. Today we’re pleased to announce our work with the Stanford libraries to digitize their collections so that every Google user can search them instantly,” said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of products.</p>

<p>For Internet users, Google’s library program makes it possible to find books that may not have been accessible before. For instance, users will be able to find out-of-print books as well as titles that weren’t previously available anywhere but on a library shelf. Library content will be displayed in keeping with copyright law. Users will be able to browse the full text of public domain works and bibliographic data about copyrighted material that is responsive to the search request. For more information and examples, visit <a href=“http://print.google.com/library[/url]”>http://print.google.com/library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin and has since grown to become a globally recognized search provider. Its long-anticipated initial public offering of stock in 2004 made headlines for months. For more information, visit <a href=“http://www.google.com”>http://www.google.com</a>."</p>

<p>Source: <a href=“You’ve requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News”>You’ve requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News;

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<p>Neato-</p>

<p>Google is taking over everything IMO.</p>

<p>I never knew that Google was founded by some Stanford doctoral students.</p>

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<p>Yep. Stanford people will eventually take over the world. Muhahahahahha. j/k</p>

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<p>I think several other schools are involved–not just Stanford.</p>

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<p>No Stanford is the main guy. Other colleges will surely follow Stanford’s lead though.</p>

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<p>Actually, Google is taking over the world…</p>

<p>Did you know that Google is in the process of making an OS and a mozilla based browser?</p>

<p>Haha, more power to Stanford and Google, though. The founders are graduates of Stanford, hehe.</p>

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<p>ick. I’d much rather have a real, tangible book.</p>

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<p>I suppose you like listening to a record player or feeling the soft hair of a horse on the Pony Express. Things change…for the better. </p>

<p>The written word is meant to be accessible to everyone. The benfits of having the entire world gain access to every book in existence, allowing the poorest of the poor to read whatever they want, and turning the internet into a true engine of knowledge far outweighs the benefit of feeling the weight of a tangible book in your hands. Books are about expression and communication. I can think of no better way to communicate to millions of people than using the internet.</p>

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<p>ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Google and the University of Michigan today (Tuesday) announced a joint agreement that will add the 7 million volumes in the U-M library to the Google search engine and open the way to universal access to information. </p>

<p>“We are exhilarated to join a partnership with Google that perfectly advances our mission as a great public university to share knowledge within the academic community and far beyond it,” said U-M President Mary Sue Coleman. “This project signals an era when the printed record of civilization is accessible to every person in the world with Internet access. It is an initiative with tremendous impact today and endless future possibilities.”</p>

<p>Google will digitally scan and make searchable virtually the entire collection of the U-M library. A person looking for information will gain the extraordinary capability to use Google to locate and read the full text of printed works that are out of copyright. For works in copyright, a search will point the way to the existence of relevant volumes by returning a snippet of text, along with information that identifies publishers or libraries where the work can be found.
…
U-M brings to the partnership a collection of great size and breadth and a position as one of the nation’s leaders in digital preservation. The U-M Library is the sixth largest in the country, and its digital collection of roughly 22,000 volumes also is one of the most ambitious in the country…" (U-M Press Release, December 14, 2004)</p>

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<p>Big YES to what rooster said.</p>

<p>I know for a fact what Kit is talking about though. I am using a Notebook myself and I am aware of what it is like to read a book from an LCD screen. (The school started the eBook thing last year, where you have your books preloaded in your computer)</p>

<p>However, after getting used to it, I must say that not only did it become an essential part (the notebook) during my day, but also made my life easier in many ways.</p>

<p>You see, for the sole pupose of yourself, you can get used to it. Though, I see that the way stanford is acually releasing their library books to the whole world is what mainly counts!</p>

<p>EDIT: GB, do you think that MIT’s OCW created some sort of an inspiration to these top-schools?</p>

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<p>Stanford is NOT in the lead on this at all. From COHE</p>

<p>Google officials and librarians hope the excerpts will be sufficient to let researchers determine whether they want to check out or purchase the book. Google will include links to online booksellers and local library catalogues along with search results. </p>

<p>The number of volumes that could be scanned is astounding: Harvard holds some 15 million volumes; the New York Public Library has 20 million; Stanford has more than 7.6 million; and the University of Michigan has 7.8 million. Oxford’s main library alone has more than 6.5 million books. </p>

<p>Harvard, Stanford, and the New York Public Library have agreed only to pilot projects with the company. Google will initially scan subsets of their collections, and decisions about whether to proceed with the rest will come later. Oxford will allow Google to scan only books published before 1900, according to Nathan Tyler, a spokesman for Google. Officials at the University of Michigan, however, have agreed to allow all of their books to be scanned, and the effort has been quietly under way for months. All of the projects are expected to take years to complete.</p>

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<p>rooster, I’m not saying this is a bad idea at all, just that I personally would prefer to hold a book in my hand. I just want the option of buying and having my own book - I don’t need it to be the only option.</p>

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<p>I work with digitized texts all the time at college, and I can tell you that real, tangible books are much better. It’s useful for fast research, but for long reading periods I very much prefer reading an actual book than a bundle of printed papers or even directly from the computer screen.</p>

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<p>"The University Library will receive and own a high quality digital copy of the materials digitized by Google. With ownership of these materials, the University will be able to provide access to the content in ways that are consistent with its mission as a great public university. For example, U-M may choose to enhance the ability for a patron to use material that is out of copyright, including creating reprints and downloadable text. Some degree of access to the copyrighted material will also be possible, and will be done within the limitations of copyright law. These forms of access will transform the way faculty, as well as students, carry out research.</p>

<p>“Libraries have long played a critical role in connecting users with the ideas and voices of scholars throughout time,” said William Gosling, University Librarian. “This partnership with Google affords us the opportunity to chart new methods of bringing these resources and the expertise of the Library to the academic community and as a public good to a broader user population. It is an exciting project that will benefit our users in direct and transformative ways.” …"</p>

<p>That’s part of the benefits to the university.</p>

<p>h88: sorry I’m not familar with MIT’s OCW.</p>

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<p>Don’t hold your breath guys, this isn’t going to happen for a long time. Probably won’t make a big dent in it until we’re out of grad school. I was at Stanford for about a month and got a glimpse of ONE of their libraries. It was gigantic to say the least, like most prestigious college libraries. Now make this several time bigger because of Harvard, Oxford and others. Then factor in the New York Public library, perhaps even more massive than those three combined. This is an epic undretaking. It’s been called the Great Pyramid of Giza of the digital age for good reason. But props to Google for doing it. I have every confidence that given enough time it WILL come to pass.</p>

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<p>Good point. This would easily take 10 years to complete.</p>

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<p>I’m with Kit. I like the feel of a textbook. It’s more comfortable to me.</p>

<p>Also, it is believed by many pure audiophiles that vinyl is superior to 16/44.1 CD.</p>

<p>I’ve listened to a Stravinsky 78rpm record before and the instruments felt so alive.</p>

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<p>It might feel better to ride a horse instead of driving a car, but I don’t see too many horse-driven carriages around. Do you?</p>

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<p>It’s hard to read a screen in bed, by the lake, while in the bathroom and all the other random places people like to study. Books still rule except for the price.</p>

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<p>Not with all this portable technology. By the time the scanning is complete, I think wireless technology will be so widespread that reading screens in various places will be as easy as reading a book.</p>