Books of Revelation [Google CEO]

WSJ Online ^ | 10/18/05 | ERIC SCHMIDT

[mathprof]

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

That's the vision behind Google Print, a program we introduced last fall to help users search through the oceans of information contained in the world's books. Recently, some members of the publishing industry who believe this program violates copyright law have been fighting to stop it. [snip]

Google's job is to help people find information. Google Print's job is to make it easier for people to find books. When you do a Google search, your results now include pointers to those books whose contents, stored in the Google Print index, contain your search terms. For many books, these results will, like an ordinary card catalog, contain basic bibliographic information and, at most, a few lines of text where your search terms appear.

We show more than this basic information only if a book is in the public domain, or if the copyright owner has explicitly allowed it by adding this title to the Publisher Program (most major U.S. and U.K. publishers have signed up). We refer people who discover books through Google Print to online retailers, but we don't make a penny on referrals. [snip] Any copyright holder can easily exclude their titles from Google Print -- no lawsuit is required.

[VictoryGal]

Boy I wish I had had this when I had term papers to do :-).

[Ostlandr]

Only one problem. An electronic record can be altered very easliy- revisionist history, anyone?
Actual books are much harder to alter.

[The Red Zone]

Any copyright holder can easily exclude their titles from Google Print -- no lawsuit is required.

They have a LOT to prove to come under fair use for this one. Especially if they start to sell ads that are in any manner facilitated by the operation of Google Print.

[so_real]

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime

Imagine a global search-and-replace on God for Allah within the whole works taking less than a second.

[montag813]

Imagine a global search-and-replace on God

How about a nano-weapon which converts every Muslim to a Christian?

[martin_fierro]

I'll just hold out for Google Cliffs Notes.

[vikk]

Google gets pdfs from publishers or scans from books that publishers send them.
There is the case of Google's politics. Go do a search for "failure" on their site.

[Charles Henrickson]

OK, I confess: My real name is Harold D. Nathan.

[Charles Henrickson]

I wonder if I'll be able to download these:

[martin_fierro]

Gotcha!

[martin_fierro]

[mikrofon]

I am Harold D. Nathan...

[Charles Henrickson]

Congratulations, you've just won a "Marty."

[Charles Henrickson]

You get the Martin Fierro "That's No Bull!" Seal of Approval:

[Charles Henrickson]

That's what we're all asking.

[redgolum]

???

[GOPJ]

Please add me to your ping list. Thanks.

[Charles Henrickson]

Please add me to your ping list.

I don't have a ping list for just my various comments in various threads. Sorry.

(The only ping list I maintain is a Swedish Ping List, to alert the pingees about threads related to Sweden.)

[GOPJ]

The only ping list I maintain is a Swedish Ping List

Thanks anyway - I'll pass on teh Swedish Ping List.