On 3/24/06, Bowerbird@aol.com <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
it was a mere 3-6 months ago that i was informing people here that their scraping of the google books would cause google to become too conservative in displaying scans.
it's annoying when people tune out warnings.
but it is even _more_ annoying when they act _surprised_ when the consequences show up!
I don't believe anyone has been mass-downloading books from Google's archive based on Bruce's index of their content, using Bruce's scraper or otherwise. Around a dozen DPers have claimed books to download, according to the list available at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jenjonliz/jon/tia/google.html (note that the list isn't currently being maintained, because there's little demand at DP for new content scraped from any site at the moment, and several of us are in the initial stages of working on a more general database-driven system for claiming books from image providers) The number of claimed books is in the low hundreds, and most of these have not been downloaded, either because research has indicated that the books are already in PG, or because there was no need for them on DP until now, due to the current glut of content working its way through the DP system. I'd be very surprised if DPers have been responsible for scraping even a hundred complete texts from Google's archive -- a tiny amount compared to the more than 35000 texts listed in Bruce's current index. As far I can tell, Google is allowing me to view all the works it has allowed me to view ever since their site was set up, so I don't see any evidence that they have become more conservative, at least in content displayed to people in the UK. On the other hand, their policy of restricting access based on the publication date being earlier than 1864 *does* exclude a lot of books which are public domain in the UK from being viewed in the UK -- and, oddly, they aren't moving the barrier forward each year, as they should (unlike the US, the public domain isn't frozen here, so new material is entering every year). It is just another example of US-based companies only dealing with non-US issues as a poorly considered afterthought, so it's not all that surprising :). -- Jon Ingram