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Harvard Withdraws Support to Google Book Search

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:57:26 -0600

Harvard has fallen out with Google over the company’s recent announcement that it has reached an out-of-court settlement worth $125 million with authors and publishers. In view of the possible consequences of the settlement, Harvard has revoked its permission to Google to scan its in-copyright material for the Google Book Search service.

Harvard believes that the settlement will lend a commercial shade to the Google Book Search service and that “the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries.” However, Google can blithely continue to scan Harvard’s out-of-copyright material.

Although the $25 million settlement is yet to be ratified by a judge, the Author’s Guild delightfully labeled it the "the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history." The deal has opened the floodgates for millions of extra titles to be part of Google Book Search. Users will have the option of purchasing a book – the revenue will be split between Google, the publisher and the author – after previewing it; the service will allow them to preview 20 percent of the pages.

Google uses OCR to Index the Text from Scanned Documents

Justin Kerr — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:48:26 -0500

Just when we thought search couldn’t get any better, Evin Levey product manager at Google has blogged about a new feature that could have a dramatic impact on your search results. Scanned documents have been appearing in Google’s search results for quite some time now, but for the most part they were usually weren’t at the top your list regardless of how relevant they may have been. The reason for this is simple; when the search engine runs into an Adobe PDF file that was scanned as an image; it wasn’t able to read the contents other then what was contained within the meta tag. The article may well have been the definitive source on the topic for which you were searching, but until now they had no way of knowing what was in the document or sorting out key words in any type of automated fashion. On Thursday this all changed and it appears the search engine has successfully implemented a form of optical character recognition that can index the text for easy searching. This adds significant power to Google’s ability to catalog things such as books which are commonly achieved as images in PDF format.

Since millions of books are available as creative commons and scanning projects have been actively publishing these works to the web, the ability to search and find results will unlock countless additional sources of information. Care to try out some examples of the new feature?

Click the jump to test this out for yourself.

Kindle Lights up Amazon with 12% of Book Sales

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:38:50 -0500

Amazon’s proprietary wireless reading device Kindle has been rather successful. It remained out of stock for months after being launched in November, 2007, despite being criticized heavily for its lack of WiFi, ugly design and limited PDF support. Now it is fast emerging as a popular electronic book reader, if a Time magazine report is to be believed.

A source inside Amazon told Time that Kindle accounts for 12% of sales of the roughly 130k titles that are both available physically and as Kindle downloads. Kindle’s share has doubled from May, when Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos had claimed it to be 6%. It is good to hear that digital distribution threatens to change the landscape of the books publishing industry as well. However, Kindle is far from perfect and its design and features need nothing less than an overhaul.

IntelliScanner Mini

Tom Edwards — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:29:41 -0500

It’s estimated that two percent of the population suffers from OCD;
IntelliScanner’s business model seems predicated on being able to
capture but a small fraction of this fraction of the populace, for only
the most compulsive of collectors—like me—will find a use for this
product. However, if you are an obsessive collector of media—and you
have a reasonable amount of disposable income—the IntelliScanner Mini
might very well become a lifelong companion.

Click Read More for more.

Mod Lit

Chris "MantaBase" Adcock — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:51:32 -0500

There's a wealth of modding information out there from people who actually wrote the book. Literally.