As you probably already know, Google Book Search now allows its users to download a PDF version of public domain books. What’s the big deal, you say? Considering services like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, what’s so special about Google offering the same?
It’s a matter of scale. Google has already secured partnerships with the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, the University of California and the New York Public Library. They are also conducting a pilot project with the Library of Congress. With these kinds of relationships, the number of public domain books made readily accessible through Google could easily dwarf the 19,000 books on Project Gutenberg or 30,000 texts at the Internet Archive. Harvard expects to share over one million out of copyright books, out of it total library of 15.5 million books. The New York Public Library openned up access to 20 million. Stanford is dishing out 9 million books. UC is committing at least 2.5 of its 34 million books. Finally, the University of Michigan is chipping in another 7 million.
So, over a total of 85.5 million books, less than one percent need to be out of copyright in order to surpass the size of the other two public projects. Certainly more than that number fall before the 1923 copyright cut-off, and if we are to believe google’s estimate via the Online Computer Library Center, 20% of books are in the public domain right now.
Aug 31, 2006
