Google to Make British Library Archive Available Online - Tech Europe - WSJ

The long tail gets longer:

The British Library today announced its first partnership with Google, under which Google will digitize 250,000 items from the library’s vast collection of work produced between 1700-1870.

Nevertheless, [a representative of the Library] expressed slight frustration that the project will not go beyond 1870: “What we really want is the 20th century, but we Europeans are often locked out of our own culture by copyright laws. So, for instance, the First World War poets, which are pre-1923 and therefore out of copyright in the USA, are still in copyright in Europe. There is an absurdity there.”

Nor, he noted, was the issue of copyright restricted to Europe: “Early adopters of digitization were American college libraries that got themselves in a bit of trouble with copyright. The 1870 date we’ve chosen is very conservative and none of the European libraries has released anything that is still in copyright. The idea of the British Library and things that are still in copyright is way too rich for our blood.” [Excerpted, emphasis added]

Read the full article @ Tech Europe - Wall Street Journal: Google to Make British Library Archive Available Online

Google's Digital Library Failed--Can Academics Succeed?

Fast Company:

Not long ago a federal judge in Manhattan scuttled Google's plans to create a digital universal library (a dream kicked off when Larry Page scanned 'The Google Book' years ago--his company has since scanned 15 million more). While some lamented the decision, others have cheered, and among the latter is a group of academic librarians who think that a digital universal library should be a public, rather than a private, good.

Check out some articles on this topic by Robert Darnton, Harvard's University Librarian and leader in the public digital library effort.

"Publishing: The Revolutionary Future"

In this article in the New York Review of Books, the respected book publisher and book technology innovator Jason Epstein peers into the murky depths of his crystal ball and tries to glimpse the future of publishing in light of e-readers, books-on-demand technology, and Amazon.

Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

Read the full article.

Also, consider this: Epstein mentions in his article the Espresso Book Machine, a project which he was involved in. Watch the video below to see the machine in action.



Want one? Save your pennies - current price tag is $101,500 - $125,500. But in ten years....who knows what the future holds?