Filed under: Internets
The Technology Review has an article, “The Infinite Library“, about Google’s library digitization project. No incredible new details, but it does bring up slightly more detailed information on the agreements the participating libraries have made with Google about the scanned data.
The Michigan library, says Wilkin, may do whatever it likes with the digital scans of its own holdings—as long as it doesn’t share them with companies that could use them to compete with Google. Such limitations may prove uncomfortable, but most librarians say they can live with them, considering that their holdings wouldn’t be digitized at all without Google’s help.
They also talk to Brewster Kahle about this. He makes three general classifications of openess that Google can take, and Google claims to be taking the middle ground of placing some restrictions to keep a competitive advantage.
The thing that worries me, gets back to Linus using Bitkeeper as a crutch. If Google is digitizing millions of books with restrictions that are annoying but not completly unacceptable, people will just accept it. This will steal the thunder from or lower the chances of an open community project from getting critical mass.
Luckily, we already do have Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders, and the Internet Archive. Now all we need is robotic scanning machines that don’t cost six figures.
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