Back the Books

Search is great, what would we do without it! Our presentations
are laden with facts we have picked up from various reports all over the world.
When a new disease is diagnosed for a dear one, we look it up first on the Web.
The inside story of a company, whose IPO looks promisingour searches span all
the facets of our lives.

But it has two serious limitations. One, information is spread
over many sites. Hence, productivity is the casualty. Second, the information is
not always credible. For that, trusted information, one has to step back to
books, magazines, and specialized sites.

Thats when you wish you could go to the library and look up
some books. But your local library might not have the books youre looking
for. If all the books ever published could be digitized and put online, what a
cool thing that would be! Exactly the thought that Googles Print Library
Project is based on. Three years ago, Google announced that it was partnering
with several university and public libraries across the world, including the
libraries of Harvard and Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of
Oxford and The New York Public Library, as part of the project. Plans included
the digitization of approximately 15 mn volumes within a decade.

Shyam Malhotra

As a source of information, book searches can take the Web to the next levelby taking us to books we never knew existed, and possibly reveal authors we were not aware of

And its not just Google. Theres the much older Project
Gutenberg. Then theres the Internet Archives Open Library and Universal
Digital Library (UDL) and Microsofts Live Book Search.

The catch is "limited content" to ensure that
copyrights are not violated. Both Google and Microsoft allow full text searches,
but show up only the part of the text that is around the searched item, not the
full page, not the full book. Google Book Search users can see just five pages
at a time of books submitted by publishers, and not more than 20% of an entire
book, through multiple searches.

UDL has digitized 1.5 mn books. But these are likely to interest
only a small group of academicians. The Internet Archives online library
offers full text downloads of works that are in the public domain, or which the
copyright holder has given permission to make available. Project Gutenberg and
many other digital library projects focus on preserving books for posterity, or
want to digitize only orphan books (books that are out of copyright), or
simply want to make books available to the largest number of people.

There is cause for concern here. We do not want generations of
kids to grow up with large amounts of low quality content. International
universities do not permit usage of any website or even the Wikipedia for
projects. User generated content has its limitations and these need to be
recognized. More researched, credible and compiled content on the Web would be
great thing to have, and the creators of this content need to be paid by
someone. Will the readers pay? Or will some advertising related model evolve?

I do not have an answer as yet.

We are in a phase where the Web is believed to be the ultimate
source of information. Book searches have the potential to take it to the next
levelbringing

in more credible sources. Take us to books we never knew existed, and possibly
reveal authors we were not aware of.

Many publishers and authors may be against Google and Microsoft
for treading into their territory as of today. We need to get copyright laws in
place which ensure that digitized books and magazines are made available on the
net. And their creators are paid. We should put the libraries where the kids
hang out. And if that place happens to be the Internet, let it be so.

The author is editor-in-chief of
CyberMedia, the publisher of Dataquest.

He can be reached at shyamm@cybermedia.co.in