Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to begin letting consumers download and print free of charge classic novels and many other, more obscure books that are in the public domain.
Using Google's Book Search service, Web surfers hunting titles like Dante's "Inferno" and Aesop's "Fables" will be able to download PDF files of the books for later reading, to run keyword searches or to print them on paper. Up to now, the service only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online....
The download initiative does not include any books under copyright....
Comment. This is big. Of the major book-scanning projects, Google's library project never rivaled the Open Content Alliance for barrier-free access to the resulting texts, even when the texts were in the public domain. Google is now lifting the two largest and most irritating barriers --those that blocked downloads and printing.
What barriers remain? Both OCA and Google restrict downloads to analog image files, even though they have digital text behind the scenes for searching. (Project Gutenberg is the best source for digitized public-domain books if you want the text in searchable, cut/pasteable form.) And last I heard, Google is still blocking access, without pattern or explanation, to users in certain countries.
So far, I've seen no announcement on the Google Book Search blog. (Why would Google let itself be scooped by the mainstream press?) Nor does the barrier-free access seem to have begun yet. Here's a public-domain 1897 edition of MacBeth scanned from Harvard's library. I can print it one page at a time, but I can't find a way to print or download the full text.
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.
