On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Greg Newby wrote:
Here's an extract from http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3447411
'"In-copyright" books that are in these collections will have basic bibliographic information available but the full text will not be accessible.
Smith told us that out-of copyright material will be available in full text, though printing will be disabled when viewing this content.'
I wonder what Smith means by "full text" ???
This doesn't sound like competition to PG, to me, and in fact the second sentence above means they won't even meet my definition of an eBook.
Not to say that these things aren't worthwhile. After all, *we* could generate eBooks from scans etc. made available for public domain content. This could be very helpful.
I've also heard they intend to start with 40,000 books only of interest to rare book people and scholars. The two projections I heard were 7 and 10 years for the project.
As to "why," when a few PG'ers met with Google last year, they stressed that from their point of view, any growth in online content is good for them. More stuff "out there" means there's more for them to find. So, this is partially altruistic, but also partially for the public good.
Of course, Google didn't follow up in any way on this meeting, and in fact didn't reply to my followup inquiries.
It was interesting to see that UC Berkeley, UIUC and Yale were not among the libraries chosen (those are the 2-4th largest academic collections in the US, after Harvard).
Yale was originally announced, at least by NPR, and they had to announce a retraction.
-- Greg
michael