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Google eyes book search expansion
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 06 January 2009, 20:13 IST
Four years ago, Google had embarked on a project to scan every printed book, paving the way for Google books. A settlement last October with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers permits Google to pay itself to build a proprietary technology infrastructure for a "Book Rights Registry". Google is looking at making it possible for users to read a far greater collection of books, including many still under copyright protection.
Every month, users view at least ten pages of more than half of the one million books that Google has scanned and made it a part of its expansive database, according to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book search. An agreement between the publishers and Google, expected to materialize in the near future, will allow both sides to make a profit from the digital versions of the books although, details about the commercial settlements remain undivulged.
Expected to give new life to copyrighted out-of-print books in a digital form, the settlement will also allow writers to make money from titles that had been out of commercial circulation for years. Five million books out of the seven million books that Google has scanned so far fall in this category.
Skeptics feel that this may lead to a monopoly of the search-engine provider, as they fear that it may allow only previews and not a complete view of the books and charge high prices for the services provided. Also, publishers who have assisted Google in the process of digitizing books have not seen any windfalls either. Moreover, some scholars feel that this will lead to a 'fragmented approach' when it comes to reading books, which is entirely undesirable.
Google's initiative isn't the only one of its kind. Project Gutenberg offers thousands of titles (mostly fiction) in txt format, while manybooks.net provides an impressive array of books in Sony format (as well as several other formats).
Google expects to generate revenue through advertising sales on pages where previews of the scanned books appear, with 63 percent of the generated takings going to authors and publishers.