Google Book Project - good or bad?

Found this via the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog - First Monday Cultural historian, media scholar, author Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses how the Google Book Project threatens copyright.
(available as MP3 and transcript)

So what does this learned man have against the oh so popular Google Book Project? Well the following for starters:

...Google’s copyright argument is problematic in the following ways. Google wants courts to rule that their project of scanning in millions of copyrighted books and then placing them on their search service in highly cut up form, in other words offering merely snippets of the entire book should qualify as a fair use of the copyrighted work. That requires a pretty big leap in terms of what fair use means, for a couple of reasons.
...
So I have a number of problems with that legal argument, but it basically comes down to this: Fair use is one the few aspects of copyright law that protects and preserves the rights of individuals to use copyrighted works freely and easily and without anxiety and without permission or payment. It brings breathing room into copyright. It allow copyright to work without cracking down on basic and necessary uses like education and criticism and commentary and parody...

The fact is this is a massive privatization of a public good. It is a massive privatization of years of collection development, years of choice and investment by the public and by librarians in these collections. And Google is getting all of this stuff essentially for free without any sort of quality control built into the system.

Google’s not required to ensure that the search engine that would guide people to these books actually delivers good results. Google is not required to make sure that the scanning process actually gets every page of every book and makes it all clear. There are no requirements that Google use metadata effectively or the metadata certainly already attached to books...

It's a really good read (or listen) so take a few minutes and see if he sways you one way or another.

Free sci-fi online

Found this via TeleRead

From Arthur C. Clarke to Ursula Le Guin and Jerry Pournelle, well-known sci-fi authors have made freebies available on the Web. Find many of these works via Free Speculative Fiction Online.

From the Free Speculative Fiction Online site:

All stories are available for free. This site does not link to pirated SF! Sites violating the copyright of the respective stories by making them accessible without the author's and/or publisher's agreement are not included.

And there's even an RSS feed for new additions!

(oh and check out the crazy chart I found for all you uber nerds out there -- size comparison chart of movie and tv space vehicles)

AlterNet | Myth of the Universal Digital Library

An interesting article from AlterNet by Annalee Newitz

A lot of Web geeks believe that one day everything ever created by humans will be available online. Call it the myth of the universal library. Here's how the myth goes: Because there is unlimited real estate in cyberspace and because media can be digitized, we can fill cyberspace with all human knowledge and give everyone access to it. Without further ado, I present to you three arguments for eliminating the myth of the universal library....

The reasons include:
1. Cyberspace does not exist.
2. Your human knowledge sucks.
3. Digitizing everything is impossible.

Be sure to give it a quick read! -- for a longer read view the comments -- that's where all the drama is located. :)

Metro can't please everyone

You know sometimes libraries can't win for losing. Metro has gone with overdrive to provide e-books to their patrons. Well one patron isn't too happy with the MS proprietary format.

...Well, a major upgrade has been done recently and I was excited to see that with an Oklahoma library card you can download audiobooks.

I jumped right in and pulled up my account, "pretty slick", I thought. I checked out my first book and hit the download button. I figured there would be absolutely no problem with the file. They show my exact iPod on the side bar.. Take time and look at the photo with the caption next to it saying, "Supported Portable Audio Devices". I didn't click that link, it clearly showed the exact iPod that I have.

Long story short, iPods are not supported, neither is an Apple computer. Why? Well, it looks like the library systems across our country are using proprietary Microsoft formats. Isn't that a kick in the pants. Oh well, I can still check them out and move the higher quality file to my iPod...

Unfortunately it's not as simple as blaming the "library systems across" the country only using MS formats. A large part of it is what's available for libraries to buy at a reasonable price and still able to serve a significant number of the public. And like it or not Microsoft is a popular platform.

What I would suggest is for people to contact their libraries when a new service is offered that they can't fully utilize. Unless libraries receive feedback -- there's no opportunity for them to know what is or isn't working.

Munseys | Free E-books

Found this via TeleRead

A wealth of e-formats

I applied the acid test to Munseys (no apostrophe in the name, by the way). Sure enough, an obscure George Gissing title came up—with options for HTML, eBookwise 1150, Plucker, Rocket eBook, Isilo, Adobe Acrobat, Sony Reader, Mobipocket and MS-Reader. No iLiad-customized books, alas, but maybe they’ll be along later. The site looks a little unfinished—a tip from the sharp-eyed Jurd sent me to it, after she wistfully typed in blackmask.com. But I bet that more design work will happen before an official unveiling, and meanwhile the author and title searches seem to work just fine. Between them and the category list, plus tags, you’ll feel at home.
...
Update, 12:43 a.m., March 15: Just heard from David after e-mailing him. The site will apparently be in beta for months, because of various technical issues. So not to worry if things get bumpy—this isn’t the final version of Munsys. While the delay is frustrating, it’s good that Blackmask will live on under a different name.