2004: GOOGLE BOOKS
[Overview]
In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a project aimed at publishers, for internet users to be able to see excerpts from their books and order them online. In December 2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a world digital library by digitizing the collections of main partner libraries. The beta version of Google Print went live in May 2005. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until further notice because of lawsuits filed by associations of authors and publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books. Google Books has offered books digitized in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New York Public Library), with either the full text for public domain books or excerpts for copyrighted books. The lawsuit with associations of authors and publishers was settled in October 2008.
[In Depth (published in 2008)]
In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a project aimed at publishers, for users to be able to see snippets of their books and order them online. The beta version of Google Print went on line in May 2005. In December 2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a digital library of 15 million books by scanning and digitizing the collections of main libraries, beginning with the Universities of Michigan (7 million books), Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, and the New York Public Library. The planned cost was an average of US $10 per book, and $150 to $200 million on ten years. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until further notice because of lawsuits filed by publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books.
Google Books was launched in August 2006 to replace the controversial Google Print, stopped in August 2005 because of main copyright concerns. Google Books offers excerpts of books digitized by Google in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New York Public Library). Google scans 3,000 books a day, including copyrighted books. The inclusion of copyrighted books is widely criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the US, lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption is that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringes copyright laws, even if only snippets are made freely available on the search engine. To counteract copyright concerns and the problems of a closed platform, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with the goal of digitizing only public domain books and make them searchable and downloadable through any search engine.