Book Commons: Difference between revisions
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“Placing full text book material is not a new idea on the web. Many services, both free and fee-based, allow you to access books online. The longest running such service is Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael Hart in 1971, with over 13,000 books available. I wrote about The Online Books Page forSearchDay last year. This wonderful collection has been online for more than 10 years, and currently provides searchable access to over 20,000 free full text books. The OBP is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library planner at the University of Pennsylvania. The Internet Archive is also digitizing books. The goal of the Million Book Project is to "create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library." One publisher that offers a large portion of their new and old material available online, free, searchable, and full image is The National Academy Press. The currently offer access to more than 3000 publications. Two fee-based services include NetLibrary offers access to about 76,000 books with about 1300 new titles added each month. You can access NetLibray books through your local public or university library, often at no charge. ebrary provides access to more than 50,000 titles (books, maps, sheet music, etc). Like NetLibrary, ebrary licenses their service to libraries and educational organizations and users can login and access via any computer with web access, in most cases for free." | “Placing full text book material is not a new idea on the web. Many services, both free and fee-based, allow you to access books online. The longest running such service is Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael Hart in 1971, with over 13,000 books available. I wrote about The Online Books Page forSearchDay last year. This wonderful collection has been online for more than 10 years, and currently provides searchable access to over 20,000 free full text books. The OBP is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library planner at the University of Pennsylvania. The Internet Archive is also digitizing books. The goal of the Million Book Project is to "create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library." One publisher that offers a large portion of their new and old material available online, free, searchable, and full image is The National Academy Press. The currently offer access to more than 3000 publications. Two fee-based services include NetLibrary offers access to about 76,000 books with about 1300 new titles added each month. You can access NetLibray books through your local public or university library, often at no charge. ebrary provides access to more than 50,000 titles (books, maps, sheet music, etc). Like NetLibrary, ebrary licenses their service to libraries and educational organizations and users can login and access via any computer with web access, in most cases for free." | ||
=Discussion= | |||
Tim O'Reilly: | |||
"Having various book search engines competing to build a proprietary online book repository seems silly to me. It also doesn't seem to be working. (For example, a quick scan of Amazon's bestseller list shows only 5 out of the top 25 books "search inside" enabled.) | |||
Book search is a big problem, and it could be solved much faster if the various vendors involved would cooperate rather than compete. Web search demonstrates that there are other grounds for competition than getting a lock on some exclusive body of content. (One might suggest that the race ought to be to be the first company to figure out how to do effective relevance matching for advertising on book search.) | |||
A related issue was also brought out in the Booksquare blog: "...scanning is indeed how Microsoft is getting published works into its database. Even if your work is already in electronic format." | |||
As everyone reader of this blog ought to know, I'm a big fan of the Google library project, which is cutting the Gordian knot of orphaned works for which publishers no longer know the ownership. Scanning makes sense for these books. But it doesn't make sense for books that are already available in some kind of electronic format. The most advanced publishers already have their books in an XML repository, but even the most backwards have at least PDFs that could be searched. | |||
Three things ought to happen to speed up the development of the book search ecosystem: | |||
1. Book search engines ought to search publishers' content repositories, rather than trying to create their own repository for works that are already in electronic format. Search engines should be switchboards, not repositories. | |||
2. Publishers need to stop pretending that "opt in" will capture more than a tiny fraction of the available works. (I estimated that only 4% of books every published are being commercially exploited.) | |||
3. Book search engines that are scanning out of print works in order to create a search index ought to open their archives to their competitors' crawlers, so readers can enjoy a single integrated book search experience. (Don't fight the internet!)" | |||
(http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/book_search_sho.html) | |||
=More Information= | =More Information= | ||
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[[Category:Media]] | [[Category:Media]] | ||
[[Category:Standards]] | |||
Revision as of 23:51, 1 January 2008
Part of the broader information commons concept, it concerns
1) the free public availability of books online.
2) the emergence of Book Swapping sites
Description
The Book Commons, overview
The following excerpt is from an article putting the Google project in context. Google aims to digitize the massive collections of the main American academic and public libraries.
“Placing full text book material is not a new idea on the web. Many services, both free and fee-based, allow you to access books online. The longest running such service is Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael Hart in 1971, with over 13,000 books available. I wrote about The Online Books Page forSearchDay last year. This wonderful collection has been online for more than 10 years, and currently provides searchable access to over 20,000 free full text books. The OBP is edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library planner at the University of Pennsylvania. The Internet Archive is also digitizing books. The goal of the Million Book Project is to "create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library." One publisher that offers a large portion of their new and old material available online, free, searchable, and full image is The National Academy Press. The currently offer access to more than 3000 publications. Two fee-based services include NetLibrary offers access to about 76,000 books with about 1300 new titles added each month. You can access NetLibray books through your local public or university library, often at no charge. ebrary provides access to more than 50,000 titles (books, maps, sheet music, etc). Like NetLibrary, ebrary licenses their service to libraries and educational organizations and users can login and access via any computer with web access, in most cases for free."
Discussion
Tim O'Reilly:
"Having various book search engines competing to build a proprietary online book repository seems silly to me. It also doesn't seem to be working. (For example, a quick scan of Amazon's bestseller list shows only 5 out of the top 25 books "search inside" enabled.)
Book search is a big problem, and it could be solved much faster if the various vendors involved would cooperate rather than compete. Web search demonstrates that there are other grounds for competition than getting a lock on some exclusive body of content. (One might suggest that the race ought to be to be the first company to figure out how to do effective relevance matching for advertising on book search.)
A related issue was also brought out in the Booksquare blog: "...scanning is indeed how Microsoft is getting published works into its database. Even if your work is already in electronic format."
As everyone reader of this blog ought to know, I'm a big fan of the Google library project, which is cutting the Gordian knot of orphaned works for which publishers no longer know the ownership. Scanning makes sense for these books. But it doesn't make sense for books that are already available in some kind of electronic format. The most advanced publishers already have their books in an XML repository, but even the most backwards have at least PDFs that could be searched.
Three things ought to happen to speed up the development of the book search ecosystem:
1. Book search engines ought to search publishers' content repositories, rather than trying to create their own repository for works that are already in electronic format. Search engines should be switchboards, not repositories.
2. Publishers need to stop pretending that "opt in" will capture more than a tiny fraction of the available works. (I estimated that only 4% of books every published are being commercially exploited.)
3. Book search engines that are scanning out of print works in order to create a search index ought to open their archives to their competitors' crawlers, so readers can enjoy a single integrated book search experience. (Don't fight the internet!)" (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/book_search_sho.html)
More Information
The Top Ten Places to Get Free Books Online, at http://www.friedbeef.com/2007/04/02/top-10-best-places-to-get-free-books-part-1/
See the comments where about 80 people add their own suggestions.
More information also at: The Online Books page, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ ; Netlibrary, http://legacy.netlibrary.com/about_us/company_info/index.asp; Million Book Project, http://www.archive.org/texts/collection.php?collection=millionbooks&PHPSESSID=45464c8f5c3a66d010a78ff7efe0c5c8; Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/; Open Source Books, http://www.archive.org/texts/collection.php?collection=opensource
Check our entry on Book Swapping sites.