Google Books, the democratization of knowledge.
A few years ago Google started digitalizing all the books from public libraries and universities. They wanted to create a book search engine which saved all those books for years after. But this didn’t happen as expected, many editorials and authors didn’t want this to be done. This made the project slow down.
October 2004, Google started scanning millions of books from some important universities such as Stanford, Oxford and from New York’s public library. Years after, other important universities joined the initiative. To do this, they used a Ephel 323 which scanned 1000 pages per minute, nowadays there are faster cameras. There was a problem, because some computers couldn’t read this pages, so they ended up buying Recaptcha to teach their computers how to read this pages.
While doing this, they scanned some protected material which wasn’t even kept in any library. This broke some laws and made authors and editorials really furious. Some of them took legal action against Google, as they thought that they should pay for the content they were copying, some of these were McGraw Hill and the Association of American Publishers.
Finally Google and their legal opponents reached an agreement. Google paid 75 million dollars due to licenses. This wasn’t considered as if Google bought the books, it meant that google was paying a rate.
This was only a short story of what happened. Google kept on publishing books without license and kept on having legal problems.
Nowadays, yo can get some books in pdf from Google and there are other books from which you can only read a small part. In 2008, Google announced the inclusion of magazines in Google Books.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search
Created: 17/12/2009
Written by: Amelia Salgado
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