{"id":768,"date":"2006-08-30T17:41:43","date_gmt":"2006-08-30T17:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=768"},"modified":"2006-08-30T17:41:43","modified_gmt":"2006-08-30T17:41:43","slug":"googles_window_on_the_public_d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2006\/08\/30\/googles_window_on_the_public_d\/","title":{"rendered":"google offers public domain downloads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google <a href=\"http:\/\/googleblog.blogspot.com\/2006\/08\/download-classics.html\">announced<\/a> today that it has made free downloadable PDFs available for many of the public domain books in its database. This is a good thing, but there are several problems with <em>how<\/em> they&#8217;ve done it. The main thing is that these PDFs aren&#8217;t actually text, they&#8217;re simply strings of images from the scanned library books. As a result, you can&#8217;t select and copy text, nor can you search the document, unless, of course, you do it online in Google. So while public access to these books is a big win, Google still has us locked into the system if we want to take advantage of these books as digital texts.<br \/>\nA small note about the public domain. Editions are key. A large number of books scanned so far by Google have contents in the public domain, but are in editions published after the cut-off (I think we&#8217;re talking 1923 for most books). Take this 2003 Signet Classic <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?vid=ISBN0451529065&#038;id=xxCZsO5hWJoC&#038;printsec=frontcover&#038;dq=darwin\">edition<\/a> of the Darwin&#8217;s <em>The Origin of Species<\/em>. Clearly, a public domain text, but the book is in <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/intl\/en\/googlebooks\/screenshots.html#limitedpreview\">&#8220;limited preview&#8221;<\/a> mode on Google because the edition contains an introduction written in 1958. Copyright experts out there: is it just this that makes the book off limits? Or is the whole edition somehow copyrighted?<br \/>\nOther responses from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.teleread.org\/blog\/?p=5413\">Teleread<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.planetpdf.com\/creative\/article.asp?ContentID=Free_PDF_eBooks_from_Google&#038;gid=7376&#038;updf\">Planet PDF<\/a>, which has some detailed suggestions on how Google could improve this service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google announced today that it has made free downloadable PDFs available for many of the public domain books in its database. This is a good thing, but there are several problems with how they&#8217;ve done it. The main thing is that these PDFs aren&#8217;t actually text, they&#8217;re simply strings of images from the scanned library [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[395,755,759,1059,1062,1417,1543,1546],"tags":[2492],"class_list":["post-768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-google","category-google_book_search","category-libraries","category-library","category-pdf","category-public_domain","category-publishing","tag-google-google_book_search-library-libraries-copyright-public_domain-publishing-pdf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}