Book news: Google in the middle
By Dave
January 5th, 2009 | Leave a comment
Although some critics view such online entities as Google as enemies of the state, an October settlement has allowed Google to continue scanning printed books, many of them out of print and otherwise lost to public exposure and making them available to scholars, researchers and other curious people.
Google, for its part, doesn’t view itself as the enemy.
“We did not think necessarily we could make money,” said Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, in a brief interview with the New York Times. “We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.”
In four years, Google has scanned roughly 7 million books, roughly 5 million of which are out of print. The settlement will allow authors/publishers and Google to collect money from the searched archives.
Google’s book search “allows you to look for things that would be very difficult to search for otherwise,” said Ben Zimmer, who runs the site, Visual Thesaurus. Zimmer discovered the value of the service when he was searching for an origin of the phrase “You’re not the boss of me” (Sorry, fans of Malcolm in the Middle and They Might Be Giants — it predates both by a few centuries).
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