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Yahoo Takes a Page From Google's Book Hundreds of Thousands of Printed Works to Be Scanned for Web

Posted on: Tuesday, 4 October 2005, 12:01 CDT

By Katie Hafner

An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities announced an ambitious plan on Monday to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.

The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its rival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago.

The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the goal of digitizing certain works of fiction and specialized or technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in Britain. The European Archive, the European equivalent of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, is also participating.

The digitization of print materials has been a continual effort on the part of various research libraries for the past several years. But the potential power of the new collaboration lies in the collective ability of many institutions to compare and cross- reference materials, said Daniel Greenstein, librarian for the California Digital Library at the University of California.

"This is the kind of platform we've been looking for a long time," Greenstein said. "Libraries digitize their stuff and put it up, but none of the libraries have comprehensive collections of everything. Now we can say: 'We have this particular edition of Mark Twain, but it's not as good as that one over there,' and we add it to the collection."

The U.S. Library of Congress, for instance, has one of the largest library collections in the world, but even that collection is incomplete. "It's all about gap-filling and collection development," Greenstein said.

Although the new project will not be a direct source of revenue for Yahoo, it could give the company's search engine more visibility. The new project's approach differs from Google's in several ways. Once a book has been digitized, Yahoo will integrate the content into its index and provide an engine for the group's Web site, opencontentalliance.org. As soon as it is available on the Web site, "we'll get a feed letting us know, so it can be indexed by us immediately," said David Mandelbrot, vice president for search content at Yahoo.

In a departure from Google's approach, the Open Content Alliance will also make the books accessible to any search engine, including Google's. Under Google's program, a digitized book would show up only through a Google search. And by focusing at first on works that are in the public domain, like thousands of volumes of early American fiction, the group is sidestepping the tricky question of copyright violation.

Last month, a group including the Authors Guild, which represents several thousand writers, filed a lawsuit against Google, contending that the company was engaged in copyright infringement because, although only text fragments are displayed, a book must be digitized in its entirety to make it searchable.

In August, Google suspended until Nov. 1 its plan to scan copyrighted books, to give authors and other copyright holders an opportunity to opt out of the program. Google has refused to give details but says a number of copyright holders have opted out.

The newly formed group appears to be taking a more cautious approach by seeking permission from copyright holders and by making works available though a Creative Commons license, whereby the copyright holder stipulates how a work can be used.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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