The topic of digitizing books is one that has been out in the open for quite some time now. However, when the topic comes up, so do the issues that go along with it. Issues such as copyright infringement, how much of the book can be digitized and decreasing book sales are just a few concerns people have when it comes to digitizing books. Yahoo, however, is in the process of launching a digitized library of archived books and books found in the public domain. Yahoo, unlike Google, may have a better shot at launching this digitized library due to the fact that they only plan on scanning and digitizing public domain books.
Also, places such as The Univeristy of California, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the UK, O'Reilly Media, and Prelinger Archives, are helping Yahoo launch it's project by providing them with content including, speeches, books, music, audio and video. Yahoo's goal is to not only provide these digitized works to the public for viewing and downloading, they are also going to try and make it as easy as possible to do so. People will be able to search works using any Web search engine, and downloadable for free. They're even going to try and make it possible to download to handhelds and iPods.
In moving toward this launch, the issue of whether or not book sales will decrease has come up, but Daniel Greenstein, associate vice provost and University Librarian of the California Digital Library, says that contrary to the belief that people will stop buying books if they can just download them, the public exposure to books will be significantly broadened if it's easy to search and view books and works on the internet, thus increasing, not decreasing the sale of actual printed material.
Finally, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) is going to help by offering the idea of the integration of French content into the OCA. Also, the OCA is doing it's best to try and figure out ways for publishers to be compensated for the books that they offer that are copyright protected. They are doing this by working directly with the publishers.
All in all, Yahoo seems to have done their homework and from reading this article, it seems very clear to me that Yahoo may have the upper hand advantage over Google when it comes to digitizing books.
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