I hope they partner with Amazon and its Kindle.
I asked Dave Lull for his thoughts on Google Books, and here's what he wrote back:
I've found answers to questions via Google Books that I probably wouldn't have found without it (not that I couldn't have gotten the answers eventually, but I probably wouldn't have been able to spend the amount of time it would have taken to find it "manually"-- i.e. I probably would' hae sent the question on to a larger library via, say, the state interlibrary system). And I've found out about books that I wouldn't have as easily and quickly.
Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows.
Dave: If Google charges prices too high, the database won't get used. Even if free access is only to some sections, not entire contents, of books, I figure some access is better than none.
Some scholars worry that Google users are more likely to search for narrow information than to read at length.Dave: Well, if all somebody needs is "narrow information," having the whole book even in hand won't get them to read the whole thing or even to see their narrow info. in context.
He concludes: But one shouldn't think that Google Books is the only source of
scanned content. See, for example, The Open Library and The Internet Archive's Text Archive.
Post bumped.
"Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows."
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the librarians in question are missing out on a potential boon for their field. If database access becomes prohibitively expensive, that just paves the way for researchers--freelance librarians, perhaps, or a network or company or librarians--to bypass gatekeepers like Google by visiting an actual, physical library and acquiring material for the rest of us at prices that undercut Google's hypothetically high rates...
Fascinating post. As well as initiatives such as the ones you describe, publishers also archive their own content of course - most book publishers now have digital archives or are creating them, and journal publishers have done this for some years, many of them going back to issue 1 of even old titles. In addition, there are several international "meta" projects between publishers, libraries and others to host this content - eg Portico is one such. All in all, it is superb that the concept of "out of print" is beoming more and more redundant.
ReplyDelete