Am 18.08.2011 13:40, schrieb James Weinheimer:
>
> I don't see why we cannot attack on several fronts at once.
Well, there seems to be a new front building up as we are musing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessinger_Publishing
"Kessinger Publishing is a publisher that reprints rare and scarce
books, out-of-print and out of copyright works of other publishers,
claiming to do so in "affordable editions". ..."
"The original dates of publication will often be prior to 1900."
[This covers, eventually, a million titles from Bavarian State Library.
They have them all in their catalog, presently linked to GBS]
"Kessinger is taking books Google has digitized, filing for
International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN), and taking them out of
public domain."
[! Wonder what Munich is thinking about that]
"Kessinger Publishing produced, in print on demand form, 190,175
titles in 2009.[1][2]"
And then you wrote,
"More than anything else, libraries need a real success they can point
to."
It looks like Google is pursuing their plans of turning their now
immense resources of scanned stuff into a marketable product:
http://books.google.com/intl/de/help/ebooks/overview.html
You *can* still download the same "ebooks" for free from GBS, but the
whole thing is morphing into a new marketing platform - and isn't it
inevitable? Note the phrase "... and taking them out of the
public domain". When what they actually do will be nothing but
downloading a pdf from GBS, print it, paste a new ISBN on it and sell
it to the customer. Look a this example:
http://books.google.de/books?id=lkcAAAAAcAAJ&dq=%22Denksteine+deutscher+Geschichte+des+Jahres+1842%22
No fewer than 4 Kessinger "Neuauflagen" attached under "Other editions",
with 4 different ISBNs. No result under "Find in a library". But you
find them in Amazon, with no link to GBS.
While GBS themselves still displays their "free edition" under "Similar
books".
Libraries have been passively involved here, making their books
available for scanning. But is this a success they can point to?
Can they top it with something their own? I think we need to grasp
the nature and the size of the challenge, and then think what miracles
catalogs, next generation or not, might work to impress the general
public. Conceivably, the confusing and frequently changing GBS etc.
might not be that difficult to top, if it weren't for the rights issues
on the one hand and their full-text advantage search on the other.
B.Eversberg
Received on Thu Aug 18 2011 - 08:44:44 EDT