{"id":900,"date":"2009-09-17T11:47:33","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T15:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=900"},"modified":"2009-09-17T11:52:50","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T15:52:50","slug":"google-feeds-the-bookstore-bookburners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=900","title":{"rendered":"Google Feeds the Bookstore Bookburners"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This morning’s Wired<\/em> blog announced the reality of something I’ve been watching for and expecting for a long, long time: Bookstores have begun installing a significant and vapor-free mechanism (starring the long-but-no-longer vaporous Espresso Book Machine) to print books on demand<\/a>. The books in question (for the time being) are out-of-copyright works scanned by Google into its Google Books system.<\/p>\n

This is a fine thing, even though it probably spells the end of the road for book preservation efforts like my own re-creation of The New Reformation<\/a><\/em> and The Pope and the Council<\/a><\/em> the hard way: Scanning and OCR extraction of text followed by conventional layout. Google books are facsimile editions, complete with library stamps, marginal notations, flaws in hundred-and fifty-year-old paper, and the occasional squashed silverfish. I’d prefer new editions, but I’ll settle for facsimiles, and certain scholars would prefer to see a facsimile to make sure that nothing of the original author’s work has been left out or changed.<\/p>\n

So no carping here, except to demand of Google: Keep going<\/em>. You’ve got the means and the manpower, so expand the system to allow the ordering of any<\/em> book–not simply the public domain ancients–for which a printable PDF image can be mounted on one of your servers. If this happens, there would be three big benefits:<\/p>\n