Publishers vs Internet Archive

Came across this pre pandemic when I received a letter from my local library about them decreasing the number of digital 'copies' of books available.    Had previously been connected to the Google Books program, that sought to digitize many books.   Still under way, but now far reduced.   There the publishers fought the digitization, even when the books involved were orphaned,  and had no remaining copyright owners.   Had not heard of the case with the Internet Archive,  which we used to track the emergence of web sites.   What does it mean to own a book?  And what does it mean in these times?    The Internet is a great resource, but shouldn't it have access to all publications?
 
Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court
In a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, the largest corporations in publishing want to change what it means to own a book.    By Maria Bustillos   in TheNation.

When Covid-19 struck, hundreds of millions of students were suddenly stranded at home without access to teachers or libraries. UNESCO reported that in April, 90 percent of the world’s enrolled students had been adversely affected by the pandemic. In response, the Internet Archive’s Open Library announced the National Emergency Library, a temporary program suspending limits on the number of patrons who could borrow its digital books simultaneously. The Open Library lends at no charge about 4 million digital books, 2.5 million of which are in the public domain, and 1.4 million of which may be under copyright and subject to lending restrictions. (This is roughly equivalent to a medium-sized city library; the New York Public Library, by comparison, holds 21.9 million books and printed materials and 1.78 million e-books, according to 2016 figures from the American Library Association.) But the National Emergency Library wound up creating an emergency of its own—for the future of libraries. ... "     (Much more in the article) 

Google Talks to Books

Google makes interesting use of their scanned books.  Could this also be used with other documents, say the knowledge of an enterprise?

Via Quartz:   (Many more good examples there)

Google’s astounding new search tool will answer any question by reading thousands of books

 " .... Imagine if you could gather thousands of writers in a circle to discuss one question. What would optimist Thomas L. Friedman say about intervening in Syria, for example?  Would chaos theorist Santo Banerjee concur?

Google now has a way to convene that kind of forum—in half a second. Speaking to TED curator Chris Anderson yesterday (April 13), legendary futurist Ray Kurzweil introduced “Talk to Books” a new way to find answers on the internet that should bring pleasure to researchers, bookworms and anyone seeking to expand their thinking on a range of topics.

Type a question into “Talk to Books,” and AI-powered tool will scan every sentence in 100,000 volumes in Google Books and generate a list of likely responses with the pertinent passage bolded. ... " 

 Google AI experiment has you talking to books  ...  in Engadget
The tech giant's other AI experiment is all about word association.

Mariella Moon, @mariella_moon in Engadget
5h ago in Internet  .... " 

Google Reader Agreement Update

Have followed Google book scanning project for years.  Why not create the universal library? Full text would be available free only for the huge numbers of books that are out of print.   Google Books exists today.  https://books.google.com/   The agreement between authors and Google,  looked like it had been worked out as class action.   Has been stalled by Google's competitors and Antitrust law.

Now it seems that the whole idea is awaiting the amending of copyright law.  With little likelihood of proceeding.  50-60 Petabytes on disk and 25 million volumes,  content inaccessible to anyone.   The Atlantic article linked to below has considerable detail on the status of this.  But probably not enough for lawyers.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” .... ' 

Google Books Copyright Case

Success, I think for broad knowledge access.  Long followed.  In the CACM:

Fair Use Prevails as Supreme Court Rejects Google Books Copyright Case
The Supreme Court on Monday declined (PDF) to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming Google's scanning of their books amounts to wanton copyright infringement and not fair use.  .... " 

Google Books is Legal

Followed this for a long time.  The underlying idea is very powerful, scan all books and make them available.  The legal issues are complex.  Have been worked on for a decade.   Google wins.  Now What?   Good piece on this in the Atlantic.

Google NGram Viewer

While considering some unstructured text analysis the Google Ngram viewer came to mind.  The system " .... charts frequencies of any word or short sentence using yearly count of n-grams found in the sources printed between 1800 and 2012 ,,, ".  Based on Google Books or other collections of texts.   In multiple languages.  Addictive for the linguistically inquisitive. We had proposed something for a textual 'content analysis' project where we could have used the idea.   In the Wikipedia.  Can anyone point me me its use for text analytics?  This made me recall it had been posted on quite a few times here before, see the tag below.  See also the book: Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. 

NGrams, Data and Patterns in Human Culture

A data lens to human culture.  As yet unread, but of interest.  Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture  Hardcover – December 26, 2013 by Erez Aiden  (Author), Jean-Baptiste Michel (Author)  See also here.

" ... Between 2007 and 2010, graduate students Erez Aiden, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Yuan Shen developed a tool for analyzing Google’s digitized books. Known as the N-gram viewer, their tool essentially just counted the number of times a word or phrase appeared in all the digitized publications for a given year.  ....

Aiden and Michel have written about their N-gram viewer and how they came to develop it in a book: Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture (2013). The book gives lots of interesting example of how N-grams might be used to track fame, understand nationalism, explore the birth and death of words and concepts, and follow the influence of inventions. Aiden and Michel see their tool as part of a big data revolution that will transform the way we understand human culture in general and history in particular. “Big data,” they argue, “is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences, and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower” (p. 8). ......   "

Big Data, Charted, Noted

A Gartner hypecycle view of Big Data, among a number of other technologies.  And Google live search summary.  Interesting, but the meaning itself is largely overblown.     " .... The Global Language Monitor site has labeled big data the Top Tech Buzzword That Everybody Uses But Don’t Quite Understand, and a lot of people hate the term. ... Among other things, critics point out that “big data” has been around for a long, long time. Here, for example, is a Google Books snippet of a “Marketing Communications” journal in 1913: “the reports and catalogues were there, but they were not arranged to give up the kind of information wanted.” ... " [See the Link]

Google Wins Book Scanning Case

In GigaOM: A long term suit against Google scanning and storing books.  Have followed this for a long time.  Finally decided in Google's favor, apparently using fair use arguments. " ... Google has won a resounding victory in its eight-year copyright battle with the Authors Guild over the search giant’s controversial decision to scan more than 20 million books from libraries and make them available on the internet  ... " 

Bookworm

A Bookworm interface for an open library.  " ... Bookworm demonstrates a new way of interacting with the millions of recently digitized library books. The Harvard Cultural Observatory already collaborated with Google Books on the Google ngrams viewer that has data for years. Bookworm doesn't work so closely with Google Books: instead, it uses books in the public domain so you can explore the information we know about a book from many angles at once: genre, author information, publication place, and so on. We're submitting it as part of the Digital Public Library of America's Beta Sprint initiative.... "

Vision for Digital Public Library

The DPLA:   Taking some of the Google scanning work further and non profit:

  " ... Last year, Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and director of Harvard University’s library system, began to raise the prospect of creating a public digital library. This library would include the digitized collections of the country’s great research institutions, but it would also bring in other media - video, music, film - as well as the collection of Web pages maintained by the Internet Archive.

Like Google Books, it would have as its goal the eventual digitization of human culture, preserving the works of the world’s authors, scholars, artists, and entertainers and making them widely available. Unlike Google Books, however, this library would not be operated by a for-profit company. It would be accessible to any person, in any place, at any time, at no cost .... "

More on Google and the Brain

A good post in Mind Hacks commenting on the Google and the brain study I also noted recently.  Knowing you have something at your fingertips does not mean than you will not increase the store of your knowledge.  Books, computers and scratches in the dirt are all knowledge tools we rapidly added to our bag of techniques.  There will be others.

Google and the Brain

Much this week about how Google and web may be changing the way the brain operates.   Here an article in Rough Type, with a good view of the debate, with an expected direction.  Probably discussed even in Gutenberg's day. Books as crippling crutches.  Nick Carr describes the research and writes:

" ... The researchers seem fairly sanguine about the results of their study. "We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools," they conclude, "growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found." Although we don't yet understand the possible "disadvantages of being constantly 'wired,'" we have nevertheless "become dependent" on our gadgets. "We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows." But as memory shifts from the individual mind to the machine's shared database, what happens to that unique "cohesion" that is the self? ... "

Google Abandons Newspaper Scans

Google has apparently abandoned their very ambitious plan to scan,  and interpret the worlds past and present newspapers, and make them available via search.  Having done some newspaper based research I could see that this would be very useful. The overall process, both the scanning and analysis, is much more difficult that for books. Remains to be seen if this will be picked up by others.

Closer to a National Digital Library

Was glad to see this item in educause, about a recent meeting concerning the establishment of a national digital library.   I have followed this idea for a long time, especially during the legal wrangle with Google about the copyright issues with authors and publishers.  Google continues its massive book scanning operation.  See Google Book Reader for the current status of this work.  This has already led to a very large corpus of scanned text from millions of books, which are being used in a number of studies at universities.  In addition this same information is readily  available to  individual researchers as well.

Yet, you do have to wonder if this information should ultimately be owned by any individual company.  It would make more sense to have it owned by a consortium that would include Universities, publishers, author groups and other organizations.  It is a massive piece of cultural value that should be readily available to all.   Today Google is funding the scanning, and makes the content available,  but can we be assured that this will always the case?  That is precisely what this meeting was about.   A good start, with lots more to do.

How Many Books Are There?

I am a book and library nut. A nice piece by Google that takes a cut at the 'N' question about books. Along the way you learn quite a bit about books and how they are classified and counted today. If you have interest in the subject, read this:

"Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you ... When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: “Just how many books are out there?”

Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a “book.” We’re not going to count what library scientists call “works,” those elusive "distinct intellectual or artistic creations.” It makes sense to consider all editions of “Hamlet” separately, as we would like to distinguish between -- and scan -- books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries ... "

Smartphone Scanning: Beyond Barcodes

I have been following and testing uses of smartphones as sensors. The obvious connection is using the ubiquitous barcodes to identify things in their environments. One alternative way is to use a scanned image of a product itself and matching that to a library of images. We tested that idea with a number of methods in the innovation center. The following article shows its being implemented already:

" Find products by scanning barcodes, cover art with Google Shopper for Android
by Brad Linder
Google has just rolled out a new application for Android called Google Shopper that lets you comparison shop for items by scanning a barcode or cover art of books, music, movies, and other objects with your Android smartphone's camera. You can also use Google's voice search capabilities.

In other words, if you see a book in a store and want to know if you can get it cheaper online, you can grab your phone and point it at the barcode or cover, or while nobody's within earshot, you can speak the title into your phone. Google Shopper will attempt to find the correct book and hook you up with the prices at various web retailers... '.

Google Selling Online Books

Forthcoming: Google Editions. Now that Google has been given the open ability to scan books in the public domain, it is only natural that they are looking at ways to deliver books to multiple kinds of readers. Even as a form of universal source, in which they could dominate. Here is an indication that they are moving in that direction. Not surprising. I like it, but I remain nervous about Google controlling too much media.

Related, the place of libraries in a digital world. Should libraries be able to distribute e-books? Have worked for and with libraries, and I think so.

More on Google Editions.
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Google Book Settlement

One of my favorite and long-time read blogs, the Language Log, has a good piece by Mark Liberman on the Google Book Settlement. There is an ongoing conference at Berkeley that he is covering about how the settlement will effect the future of information access. Have followed this for a long time and will track the Language Log blog for more details. Access to knowledge is one benefit of the reader, but another is to allow better machine access:

" .. To get the best results, you want to combine machine learning with human judgment. To what extent will the terms of the settlement allow this? Individuals and small organizations should be encouraged to cultivate the parts of the academic universe that they know best — Google books will be a big part of the resources for this, but it should be easy to combine it with other things. Does the proposed settlement inhibit this? .... "

Stone Skipping at the Shore

Recently had a delightful week at the beach. As I have a number of times I took along James Trefil's book: A Scientist at the Seashore. Its a fun book if you want to know explore a number of physics 'whys' about the beach. One topic he covers is stone skipping on the sand and on the water. He mentions a 1968 article on the topic that had been published in SciAM. I tried to look it up in Google Books, but it was not there. I assume Sciam has not given permission for old issues. Probably could have found that in the library or in an old bookstore. Too bad, could quickly find a good article on stone skipping in the Wikipedia. Things have changed.