Sep 10, 2009

Daily Cal Quotes Brian Carver on Google Book Search

From The Daily Californian

Google Under Fire for Digital Textbook Plans

By Amy Brooks

If a controversial settlement between Google, publishers and authors is approved by a judge, it may become possible to go an entire semester without spending a dime on textbooks.

However, the settlement, which will be discussed next month in court, raises important issues about property rights and user privacy.

The settlement is a result of Google's plan to create a searchable database of the world's books, which required it to scan books into its collection. Although only snippets of copyrighted books are available without copyright permission, publishers and authors sued the company in a class action suit....

Brian Carver, an assistant professor in the School of Information, said the scanning project is an amazing opportunity to increase access to books.

"... The sheer scale of the scanning project is unprecedented and might never be fully repeated," he said in an e-mail. "For such a large portion of all the world's books to be fully searchable opens up the opportunity for individuals to have easy access to more information than we could have even imagined 15 years ago."

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016