...In Summer of 2005, the “Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels” (German publishers’ and book shops’ association) announced a project called “Volltextsuche Online” (VTO, “full text search online”) to counter the Google Book Search project. They also supported one lawsuit by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG) against Google [later withdrawn]....
The Börsenverein announced VTO to start in spring 2006. The start of VTO was later postponed to the book fair in fall 2006. A Powerpoint presentation [PPT] from last week says that an early system for uploading data will go online this week....
The original proposal of decentralized storage within the publishers servers turned out to be not practical, the idea was scrapped. The draft contract between VTO and the publishers reserves the right to VTO to store the data anywhere they like....
Book publishers have to pay to upload their data to VTO....However, the annual fee is suspended until March 31: Anyone who participates in VTO before that day can get one year free of charge.
Unlike Google Book Search, there is no way to just send the physical book to VTO, the publisher has to send in a prepared PDF file and several meta files. The specification of the meta files is currently in version 0.9 [PDF], it basically lacks any specific meta file information....
VTO claims that there is no way of saving or printing the pages of the book. When I spoke with VTO representatives, they acknowledged that this sentence is not meant literally but that they only prevent users (lobotomized users?) from saving the files by disabling the right mouse button or something....
As a very lame “proof of concept,” I was able to download all the 303 pages of the bestselling book “Measuring the World” by Daniel Kehlmann....No “hacking” was involved and this task can be pretty easy parallelized. Or scripted, for that matter....
I am currently unable to see VTO as a competitor to Google Book Search....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/16/2007 02:36:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
