Forum Moderators: goodroi
Geoff Nunberg, one of America's leading linguistics researchers, laid this rather ominous tag on Google's controversial book-scanning project amidst an amusingly-heated debate this afternoon on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley."This is likely to be The Last Library," Nunberg said during a University conference dedicated to Google Book Search and the company's accompanying $125m settlement with US authors and publishers. "Nobody is very likely to scan these books again. The cost of scanning isn't going to come down. There's no Moore's Law for scanning.
"We don't know who's going to be running these files 100 years from now. It may be Google. It may be News Corp. It may WalMart. But we can say with some certainty that 100 years from now, these are the very files scholars will be using."
As reported at The Register
[theregister.co.uk...]
Google Books Settlement Con As part of his ongoing campaign against Google's $125m book-scanning pact, the Internet Archive's Peter Brantley has warned that even if authors opt-out of Google's Book Search service, the web giant will still have the power to mine their book data for use in other services."There is value in the comprehensiveness [of Google's digital collection of books]. It's something we need to think about, that scholars and researchers need to think about: whether or not they want to entrust this single comprehensive collection to a single corporate entity," Brantley said Friday during a conference dedicated to the Google Book Settlement at the University of California, Berkeley.
"Authors can remove works [from Google Book Search]. But Google will still be able to utilize those works, in many cases, for integration into other products, like Google Maps and others, that draw upon the variety of knowledge held in those books.
"As a rights holder, I can't pull my book from the corpus for data use only, and even if I pull my book for my display purposes, it's still in [the data corpus]."
Also at The Register... and perhaps a speaker at the same meeting above?
[theregister.co.uk...]
"There is value in the comprehensiveness [of Google's digital collection of books]. It's something we need to think about, that scholars and researchers need to think about: whether or not they want to entrust this single comprehensive collection to a single corporate entity," Brantley said Friday during a conference dedicated to the Google Book Settlement at the University of California, Berkeley.
Trouble is, who else but Google is willing to do it? Even Microsoft, a company with deep pockets, withdrew the funding from its own scanning project last year.
It's easy to say that the scanning ought to be done by the National Library Association or the Library of Congress or some academic consortium, but without funding, such proposals are empty posturing.
