Why does google books

Answer: Any publisher or other copyright holder can easily exclude their titles from Google Books at any time, for any reason. We've posted the details on how to do that here and have a support team standing by to help anyone who has trouble doing it on their own.

It's worth bearing in mind, however, that under no circumstances will anyone ever see a full page of an in-copyright book through Google Books without the copyright holder's permission; when a book is under copyright, we show only snippets of text surrounding the search term unless the copyright holder has given us explicit permission to show more. Question: Do booksellers like Amazon pay to include links on Google Books? Answer: We provide links to booksellers on Google Books pages because we want to make it easier for users to buy books and for publishers to sell them.

Booksellers don't pay to have their links included in Google Books, and Google doesn't receive any money if you buy a book from one of these retailers. Question: Why do some in-copyright books have full pages visible? Answer: Whenever you can see more than a few snippets of an in-copyright book in Google Books, it's because the author or publisher has joined our Partner Program and granted us permission to show you the Sample Pages View, which helps you learn enough about a book to know whether you want to buy it.

This is something we do with a publisher's explicit permission. The books were unloaded from the trucks onto the kind of carts you find in libraries and wheeled up to human operators sitting at one of a few dozen brightly lit scanning stations, arranged in rows about six to eight feet apart. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1, pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place.

The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano. What made the system so efficient is that it left so much of the work to software. Rather than make sure that each page was aligned perfectly, and flattened, before taking a photo, which was a major source of delays in traditional book-scanning systems, cruder images of curved pages were fed to de-warping algorithms, which used the LIDAR data along with some clever mathematics to artificially bend the text back into straight lines.

At its peak, the project involved about 50 full-time software engineers. Even some Googlers themselves thought of the project as a boondoggle. What are you thinking? But Larry and Sergey were big supporters. In August , Google put out a blog post announcing that there were ,, books in the world. The company said they were going to scan them all.

This particular moonshot fell about a hundred-million books short of the moon. What happened was complicated but how it started was simple: Google did that thing where you ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and forgiveness was not forthcoming.

Their original goal was just to let you search books. They likened their service to a card catalog. But surely the ability to find something because a term appears in a book is not the same thing as reading the book. It was important for Drummond to be right. Copyright owners pounced. They had good reason to. This seemed obviously wrong: If you wanted to copy a book, you had to have the right to copy it—you had to have the damn copyright. Letting Google get away with the wholesale copying of every book in America struck them as setting a dangerous precedent, one that might well render their copyrights worthless.

An advocacy group called the Authors Guild, and several book authors, filed a class action lawsuit against Google on behalf of everyone with a U. A group of publishers filed their own lawsuit but joined the Authors Guild class action shortly thereafter. The same thing happened with makers of vinyl records and early purveyors of commercial radio.

In the 60s, cable operators re-aired broadcast TV signals without first getting permission and found themselves in costly litigation. Movie studios sued VCR makers. Music labels sued KazaA and Napster. Instead, they cut a deal and start making money from it. Musicians get a new stream of income, and the public gets to hear their favorite songs on the player piano.

When the VCR came out, film executives lashed out. The major studios sued Sony, arguing that with the VCR, the company was trying to build an entire business on intellectual property theft. But Sony Corp. Universal City Studios, Inc. The Sony case forced the movie industry to accept the existence of VCRs. Not long after, they began to see the device as an opportunity. It only took a couple of years for the authors and publishers who sued Google to realize that there was enough middle ground to make everyone happy.

This was especially true when you focused on the back catalog, on out-of-print works, instead of books still on store shelves. Once you made that distinction, it was possible to see the whole project in a different light. Maybe they were giving it a new life. Google Books could turn out to be for out-of-print books what the VCR had been for movies out of the theater.

Out-of-print books, almost by definition, were commercial dead weight. If Google, through mass digitization, could make a new market for them, that would be a real victory for authors and publishers. But once you had that goal in mind, the lawsuit itself—which was about whether Google could keep scanning and displaying snippets—began to seem small time.

Suppose the Authors Guild won: they were unlikely to recoup anything more than the statutory minimum in damages; and what good would it do to stop Google from providing snippets of old books? If anything those snippets might drive demand. But where did he say it? They misattribute everything, usually to Mark Twain. To answer such questions, you need Google Book Search, the tool that magically scours the texts of millions of digitized volumes. On mobile, good luck locating it anywhere.

Google Book Search is amazing that way. When it started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, it would import the entire body of pre-internet writing into its database.

Today, Google is known for its moonshot culture, its willingness to take on gigantic challenges at global scale. Scan All The Books! Instead, Google Books has settled into a quiet middle age of sourcing quotes and serving up snippets of text from the 25 million-plus tomes in its database.

Maybe so. Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. When I started work on this story, I feared at first that Books no longer existed as a discrete part of the Google organization — that Google had actually shut the project down.

As a functioning and useful service, Google Books remained a going concern. But as a living project, with plans and announcements and institutional visibility, it seemed to have pulled a vanishing act. All of which felt weird, given the legal victory it had finally won. At the birth of the project, in , as Larry Page and Marissa Mayer set out to gauge how long it might take to Scan All The Books, they set up a digital camera on a stand and timed themselves with a metronome.

Once the company got serious about ramping its scanning up to efficient scale, it started jealously guarding details of the operation.

Jaskiewicz does say that the scanning stations keep evolving, with new revisions rolling out every six months. So has studying more efficient techniques for human operators to flip pages. To understand how Google Books arrived at this point, you need to know a few things about copyright law, which essentially divides books into three classes.