I'm not sure Roy is referring to the same problem.
Google has been a little vague about what is and is not
available (and about
a lot of other things), but from what I've heard from
friends in other
countries they seem for now to be taking the most
conservative possible
interpretation of copyright for each country and then
applying that to all
works, whether or not it's appropriate for a particular
work or edition. So
in the US anything published before 1923 is available
because that's a
pretty easy thing to program, but for now they're not
bothering with
individual works that may be in the public domain because
life + 70 years
has expired or because copyright was not renewed.
As they keep saying, it is a beta, so mayb they'll move to
a more nuanced
interpretation of copyright later on. And that's something
they can change.
I'm more worried about the poor quality of some of the
scans and some of the
decisions about metadata such as not including volume
numbers. I know full
text search is supposed to take care of all that, but
they're scanning a lot
of non-Roman alphabet texts and their OCR is miserable to
non-existent.
- Jim Campbell
Campbell Virginia.edu
> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounceswebjunction.org
> [mailto:web4lib-bounceswebjunction.org] On Behalf
Of Roy Tennant
> Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:27 AM
> To: 'Web4Lib'
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of
> out-of-copyright Books
>
> On 8/30/06 8:16 AM, "David J. Fiander"
<dfianderuwo.ca> wrote:
>
> > Leslie Johnston wrote:
> >
> >> It's definitely not consistently available
yet, but here's
> an example:
> >>
> >>
> http://books.google.com/books?vid=O
CLC18938030&id=HKackp-vG-YC&pg=PA9
> >> &lpg=PA9
> >> &dq=abbott+flatland
> >
> > It's also only available within the United
States. While
> Flatland is
> > most definitely in the public domain worldwide, we
> Canadians only get
> > to see excepts, as if it was still a restricted
text.
>
> This is one of my gripes about Google Books. Although
the
> work itself may be clearly in the public domain, if a
> publisher has republished it and is currently selling
it, it
> is locked down on Google Books. Add to this the fact
that
> Google Books apparently knows nothing about the freely
> available out of copyright works on the Internet and
you have
> a ridiculous situation.
> Sometimes you are actually much better off searching
Google
> proper for a book than you are Google Books, since
Google
> *does* know about openly available out of copyright
works.
> Roy
>
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>
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