Via Resource Shelf, we learn of a report in Library Journal that says Google is close to settling a three-year-old lawsuit with publishers surrounding Google Book Search. Meanwhile, some of Google’s university partners have banded together to launch their own book search service, Hathi Trust.

In the legal case, five publishers sued to stop Google from scanning the entire content of books that are still under copyright protection. Google has said that only a small portion of the scanned books are made available through Google Book Search, so the program constitutes “fair use.” They also say publishers can opt out of the program.

Rumors in the past week are that negotiations have “heated up” and a settlement is “imminent.” Spokespersons for both Google and the Association of American Publishers dismissed the speculation.

Meanwhile, the book scanning continues. Although some publishers are unhappy about Google’s scanning of copyrighted material, more than two dozen major libraries have been cooperating in the Google Books Library Project.

Earlier this week, a group of major US university research libraries announced HathiTrust, a shared archive of their digital book collections. A University of Michigan librarian told the New York Times that a “majority of the 2 million or so volumes already in HathiTrust were digitized by Google.” As part of its deal with university, Google gives a copy of what’s been scanned to them. HathiTrust will also include some books that the libraries have digitized themselves.

Want to search Hathi? You can’t easily, right now. The site lists some options but say a single search box is in the works.

Postscript Barry: Google Doubles Number Of Book Scan Publisher Partners from Reuters has more details on Google’s recent book scan initiatives. Plus you can see more details at Techmeme.

An article in the New York Times today explores the “book search” initiatives at Google and Microsoft and the resistance of some research libraries to participating. The reason cited is that both search providers are asking for exclusivity: “Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services.”

Many research institutions are opting instead to join the Open Content Alliance, which promises public access to the content and information without any restrictions. Yahoo and Microsoft are members of the Open Content Alliance. Accordingly, it’s not entirely a zero-sum game. Libraries can elect to participate in the Open Content Alliance and a search engine program, which some are doing.

Institutions participating in the Open Content Alliance, however, must pay the cost of scanning their libraries themselves. That’s the one catch. But, as the article points out, some will do that to prevent their information from being controlled by commercial organizations and potentially used for commercial gain, if only indirectly.

The information that makes its way into the archives of the Open Content Alliance, however, will ultimately be available to the search engines as well.

Google, Baidu race to set up online library in China via Reuters reports that Baidu and Google are going at it to be the largest and best book search service in China. Reuters writes that Peking University Library in Beijing, “one of Asia’s largest academic libraries,” already has a partnership agreement with Baidu. We reported in the past that Google partnered with Cite Publishing Holding Group hoping to bring 3,000 plus books to their new Google China Book Search service.

Freeing Google Books from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped covers him trying an interesting experiment. Can Google dictate that public domain books that it has scanned and distributed on the web really be subject to restrictions on non-commercial work?

First a look at how Google provides these books. Google says that PDF downloads are available for most out of copyright books via Google Book Search. Sadly, I find the instructions on finding these don’t match the actual difficulty in doing so. From the instructions:

Search for downloadable books by clicking on the “Full view books” radio button before entering your search terms. Once you select a book from your results, you’ll see a “Download” button on the right side of the page if the book is out of copyright. Click the button to download a PDF of the book to your computer. Once the book is downloaded, you can print it and read it at your own pace.

Unfortunately, getting back results in this way doesn’t make it immediately clear which books can be downloaded or not. For example, here’s search on the word cars. I did the search to match “Full view books” as instructed. After that, the only way to know if any of these are downloadable is to click on each individual book and check. That’s a pain.

The advanced search page doesn’t offer any help, either. Really, there needs to be a third option on the regular search page to narrow to downloadable books, like this:

1. All books
2. Full view books
3. Downloadable books

I did try to narrow using a filetype search, like this:

cars filetype:pdf

That’s not supported. The only other option is to search for books from before 1923, since Google reports that as the general cutoff date is uses to consider a work public domain. Here’s an example of that.

I’ve had to kind of fake it. Google Book Search demands a date range, rather than giving you a “Books Before X Date” option. So I went after books from between 1000 and 1923 AD.

Here’s an example of one of those books, close up. Look over on the right hand side of the screen, and you see an invitation to download it, like this:

After you download it and open the PDF, you’re greeted by this warning and document guidelines on the opening screen:

This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world’s books discoverable online.

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that’s often difficult to discover.

Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file – a reminder of this book’s long journey from the publisher to a library and finally to you.

Usage guidelines

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

We also ask that you:

+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.

+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.

+ Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can’t offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book’s appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.

There’s also a watermark on pages of the book, as you can see in the example below:

The guidelines have Philipp scratching his head. If these are public domain books, then how can Google decide to restrict them in any way, such as for commercial publication. Yes, it scanned the books. Maybe it owns the scans? But maybe not.

To find out, he’s doing a test project. Authorama is a site he’s created that lists 100 books he’s downloaded from Google Book Search, to allow others to redistribute or use as they like.

I’m checking with Google to see what they think about the project and the legality of trying to impose restrictions on public domain books, just because they’ve scanned them.

Postscript: I’ve now heard back from Google, which says:

We have gotten this question in the past.  The front matter of our PDF books is not a EULA [end user license agreement].  We make some requests, but we are not trying to legally bind users to those requests.  We’ve spent (and will continue to spend) a lot of time and money on Book Search, and we hope users will respect that effort and not use these files in ways that make it harder for us to justify that expense (for example, by setting up the ACME Public Domain PDF Download service that charges users a buck a book and includes malware in the download).  Rather than using the front matter to convey legal restrictions, we are attempting to use it to convey what we hope to be the proper netiquette for the use of these files.

Google Book-Scanning Efforts Spark Debate from the Associated Press is an excellent look how the rivalry between Google’s library scanning project and that of the Open Content Alliance – backed by Yahoo and Microsoft — is getting more heated. Google pretty much comes off as the evil company trying to lock up books for its own commercial goals. I’ll try to restore some balance to that. But then again, perhaps the rhetoric is the only thing that will make Google decide it should figure out a way to better assure people that the scanning will be as open source as possible.

The OCA, and in particular Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive that’s also behind the project, seems to be ramping up the accusations that Google is running a closed system that goes counter to Google’s "Don’t Be Evil" philosophy. From the article:

"They don’t want the books to appear in anyone else’s search engine but their own, which is a little peculiar for a company that says its mission is to make information universally accessible," Kahle said.

He said similar things last month, and far more strongly. From the transcript of a video Philipp Lenssen made at Google Blogoscoped:

Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare. I mean this is 1984 – a book about how bad the world would be if this really came about, if a few governments’ control and corporations’ control on information goes too far.

Wow. I’ve got great respect for Brewster, but I think making this out into some 1984 info control scenario is going too far. For its part, Google disagrees:

None of Google’s contracts prevent participating libraries from making separate scanning arrangements with other organizations, said company spokeswoman Megan Lamb.

Aside from cutting separate scanning deals, I believe the agreements Google has with libraries gives them copies of what Google has scanned to do with as they wish. So I think it’s a stretch to say Google’s trying to keep everything for themselves. But Google still comes across the crass commercial one in all this:

The motives behind Google’s own book-scanning initiative aren’t entirely altruistic. The company wants to stock its search engine with unique material to give people more reasons to visit its website, the hub of an advertising network that generated most of its $2 billion profit through the first nine months of this year.

Despite its ongoing support for the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft earlier this month launched a book-scanning project to compete with Google. Like Google, Microsoft won’t allow its digital copies to be indexed by other search engines.

Microsoft gets a slight nod at not perhaps so altruistic, but lets be more blunt. This month’s launch of Microsoft’s Live Search Books (gad, what are with these terrible names!) was for all the same commercial reasons Google has. There’s information in books. Providing access to information has been proving a money maker.

Note the part about Microsoft not allowing its digital copies to be indexed. I think this and a similar reference to Google is talking about preventing spiders from crawling the respective book search sites, to automatically download PDF files. That wouldn’t be useful anyway. You need the associated index that’s making the *images* of these books searchable.

Having tossed out some bones of balance Google’s way, let me jump back in on the side of greater cooperation and openness that the OCA is pitching.

Yes, I dearly wish Google would get together with them and other scanning projects and come up a real, open way to index this material. I’ve written before about concerns we’re going to have wasteful, duplicated efforts and some type of VHS/Betamax battle of digital book formats. Gary Price and others have voice concerns as well. The AP story also touches on this:

But some of the participating libraries may have second thoughts if Google’s system isn’t set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.

For instance, Tufts worries Google’s optical reader won’t recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane thinks it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.

The battle shaping up over book scanning is unfortunate. The books out of copyright aren’t Google’s books — they aren’t the OCA’s books — they aren’t the library’s books. They’re OUR books. Get it together, everyone, and sort something out. Plus, I’d still like to see Google stop scanning books that are in copyright without express permission to help ease the concerns publishers are having. More on that in my past post, Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles.

The Live Search Blog announced that Microsoft released a beta named Live Search Books this morning. Plus they enhanced Live Search Academic by adding millions of new articles, plus indexing theses, dissertations, and books within these disciplines.

The details on Live Search Books Beta:

The U.S. beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that has been “off-limits

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