Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
IT’S EASY TO WRITE off books as yesterday’s medium. They’re not searchable, they take up space, it’s ‘dead tree media’.
But books are such a boon to civilisation that Google kicked off “Project Ocean” in 2004. It came to be known as Google Books, an effort to digitalise and catalogue every book and make them freely available online.
It’s a polarising idea. Researchers and academics love the promise of instant access to any printed material they could ever want, but copyright holders and the Authors Guild were far from pleased. Not only were they not being compensated for their work, but Google launched the project without so much as seeking permission from them.
One of Google’s core missions is to organise the world’s information, and with books being the valuable storehouses of data that they have been for millennia, it is only obvious that the company would seek to establish a universal library of the world’s knowledge.
A documentary titled ‘Google and the World Brain‘ takes a detailed look at this ambitious undertaking, interviewing people who love and loathe it alike. For all the simplicity of ink and paper, the movie shows us that the complicated rabbit hole of intellectual property law runs far deeper than you’d think.
Here’s the story of Google Books…
Books have carried the world’s knowledge for millennia.
Famed sci-fi author HG Wells one hypothesized “a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent ‘World Encyclopedia’ that could help world citizens make the bes use of universal information.”
He wrote a book about the idea called ‘The World Brain’ in which he said something like this would, at least in part, require gethering as many “old fashioned” bookes as possible to squeeze out all the information contained in them.
But there are a lot of books out there and such an undertaking would require a lot of time and money.
Image: Google’s Sergey Brin.
Enter Google, a company with the resouces and commitment to information organisation to make such things come to light.
At a cost estimated between $30 and $100 per book, the company began digitising books by coordinating with libraries around the world to borrow as many books as possible, copyrighted and uncopyrighted alike.
Robert Darnton of the Harvard University Library was happy to let the company digitize the library’s public domain books. Other libraries offered up copyrighted books as well. Google even scanned old texts from a monastery in Spain.
Similar efforts have been made in the past. Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg is the world’s oldest digital library, archiving public domain writings since 1971.
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive not only aims to catalogue all books, but all web content as well.
IBM’s Watson supercomputer famously beat its human opponents in an exhibition match of Jeopardy due to its ability to process natural language and access huge stores of data taken from the Internet and libraries alike.
Above is a still frame from the only known video footage (six seconds long) of an actual Google book scanning setup. Famed futurist and current Google employee Ray Kurzweil is acknowledged as the inventor of OCR, or optical character recognition, which is the technology that enables a computer to convert a scanned document into digital text.
Advanced book scanning setups use professional cameras and lighting to capture incredibly high quality images before running them through OCR software and uploading them to the Internet.
Proponents of Google Books love it for many reasons, not only for the instant access to any book, but for the fact that books can essentially become immortal when scanned and stored digitally. No more lost books due to floods or fires.
But the opponents of the project want to be fairly compensated for their work. The Authors Guild sprang for legal action.
Kevin Kelly of Wired sees it as perfectly legal and useful. He said that all ideas are built on top of other ideas, so no one can “own” an idea.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former director of the National Library of France, found the idea appalling. He wants to protect culture and artists’ rights.
There was, of course, a court case to address the matter. It was resolved last month when Judge Denny Chin ruled that digitizing books was transformative enough that it was fair use.
We suspect paper books aren’t going anywhere anytime, and with Google’s book scanning operation moving forward with the law’s blessing, e-books are here to stay.
Watch the trailer for the movie:
(Video: polarstarfilms/YouTube)
- Declan Love, all images screenshots from Google and the World Brain.
Nobody loves taking the bus. The government has made having a car so damn expensive some people have no other option
If “bus” is code for “piss” then I wholeheartedly agree!
I love my Dublin Bus.
@Brian you see amazing things when you take the bus, such as:
-junkies having sex in the back;
-someone talking too loud on the phone;
-oh shit I think I just stepped on poop;
-how did a begger get in to ask me for money? o.o
Actually nevermind, point taken o.o
If you’re using public transport never give up your seat to an old lady…
That’s how I lost my job as a bus driver.
Now that passenger numbers have increased will fares be coming down? After all, one of the main reasons for all the increases over the last number of years was falling passenger numbers.
X1,000
I love the bus, you do see all sorts. I once seen two junkies having sex at the back of bus coming home one night. To quote them he said “get your tits out?” She replied “Ah noo not yet, wait” charming experience all together
I think we are the only country that say thanks to the bus driver when getting off
We’re the only country that’s passes the bus driver getting off the bloody thing holding up all the boarding passengers.
Because you’d need two staff per bus to do it the other way. Saying thanks to the bus driver is just polite. You say thanks to a taxi driver so why not a bus driver?
We like to think we are. They do it in most countries. It’s just of those ‘aren’t we Irish cute’ things.
Do you know what Irish people hate? A lack of proper fücking transport!
I often use the train, Bus Éireann and the luas and I think all those services run quite well although they could do with coming down in price. Dublin Bus on the other hand is the most chaotic, confusing and user unfriendly service out there, it’s as if they don’t want people to use the bus.
Bus Eireann intercity is fine if you want to get from the very start of the route to the very end of it. The timetable is only a vague suggestion for stops in between.
And make sure you use relieve yourself before hand as if theres a jax its sure to be locked.
Dublin Bus would be brilliant if it wasn’t for the other passengers.
I urinate several times a day, too. Doesn’t mean I love it.
It’s the bus drivers because we are all so sexy!!!
I love the bus. I bleedin hate the withworth road!
They’re a nightmare, they bring you on safari. I honestly think the number 16 passes through Donegal twice on its route.
I hate taking the bus with a burning passion.
Must make it difficult to sit down alright.
Excellent Caroline B-)
And yet before September comes they will be given an increase in ticket prices citing “falling passenger number”.
This will be the third consecutive year.
Blame FG/Lab… Maybe they will give Dennis O’Brian favourable loan terms so he can but it. He seems to be buying everything else!!!!
How come there is no link to the previous story about two people being assaulted on the bus?
Irish people love getting the bus without being beaten mercilessly for no good reason by some waster….
Nice phrasing…. They experienced a surplus owing to allocation of additional funding and subsidies.
So they run an unprofitable constant tax payer subsidised deficit. The deficit was merely less than they expected it to be this year?
Said no man ever
Just reading this as I wait for the number 44 to arrive. Five minutes to go. I’m all excited now. I’ll let you all know how I got on…. oh, hurry up!
Do you know what Irish people love?
Gossiping, getting things rear ways and Chinese rumours???
Whoops…
So you don’t think there are more journeys because more people are in work?
What work, there are more journeys because the pensioners love riding the free travel lol.
“Public transport is for losers” – Homer.
have your say