Yahoo's Book Scanning Effort Not Quite What It Seems

from the well,-not-quite dept

Google has been getting a ton of attention lately for its effort to scan as many books as they can and make them searchable online. Most of the attention has been on the disputes with various publishers and authors over whether or not this is legal. So, along comes Yahoo to announce that they, too, are getting into the book scanning business and you might expect similar fights. Except... Yahoo's book scanning project isn't at all what it seems. First, Yahoo's involvement seems fairly small compared to others involved. The content will be hosted by the Internet Archive and will be accessible to all search engines, should they choose to search it. However, much more important is that to avoid the various legal questions, they're only scanning books in the public domain, which (thanks to continued copyright extension) is a pretty small percentage of what's out there (and what's interesting to read). Other publishers/authors can "opt-in," but very few are likely to do so. I'm reminded of an old episode of the (now sadly, long gone) TV show Sports Night, where one of the characters has to pay a fine for singing Happy Birthday on the air. He then insists he will only sing songs in the public domain in the future, and begins making up a list which is both tiny and unique for mostly being terrible. "Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum" indeed. While it's a nice project, it comes off more like Yahoo's reactive response to Google's project... but where they don't have the guts to stand up to authors and publishers to explain why getting the books online is a good thing.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, 3 Oct 2005 @ 5:47am

    Any bets?

    Anyone want to take bets that if Google should prevail in their legal battle that Yahoo will suddenly grow a pair and start scanning all books, just like Google?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Precision Blogger, 3 Oct 2005 @ 8:39am

    A great many public domain books are already onlin

    Project Gutenberg, at http://www.gutenberg.org/, has already placed careful texts of 16,000 public domain books online. Yahoo will be duplicating their efforts unless they go for books well off the beaten track. If they do manage to scan many books that are not in the Gutenberg list, I expect Gutenberg volunteers to use their scans to OCR and publish those books (if Yahoo does not prevent this).
    - Precision Blogger

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    data64, 4 Oct 2005 @ 4:44am

    Project Gutenberg

    So Yahoo is duplicating what is being done with Project Gutenberg ? Seems a little silly to me.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.