Google kicked off its controversial Google Print initiative today with the launch of a searchable collection of public domain — i.e. not under U.S. copyright — books and reports. Every page of these books, from the collections of partner libraries at the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library, and Oxford, is available online.
Google’s official blog notes also that “small snippets” of copyrighted books are online, an obvious nod to the contentious debate and litigation among publishers over Google’s Print project. It’s a fun collection, albeit a “classic” collection given the age of the materials. A quick search seems to turn up the entired published works of Charles Dickens, for example, or the entire Warren Report on the investigation into the assasination of President Kennedy.
Even the “snippets” are useful because they pull up recent, copyrighted works related to the subject being searched, no doubt spurring the desire to purchase those works. For example, a search on the Edwardian writer John Galsworthy turns up not only the full public domain text of his masterpiece “The Forsythe Saga,” but also an intriguing list of copyrighted books related to Galsworthy available from rare book dealer Kessinger Publishing that I wasn’t aware existed.
If I were a book publisher, I’d think this is the coolest invention since the printing press.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:14 AM|Comments(0)
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