Google's Book Crawler Gets Disallow from Some Publishers
Google blog recently announced changes to the Google Print project in which they're scanning libraries and putting the data in their index.

Is this news? Well, maybe not so much to online marketers, unless you have print books you'd like scanned. (coming soon: optimizing your books for search engines ;) It is news in the larger story of Google's indexing of all data known to mankind.

So here's the goods:

Publishers can add books to the to-be-scanned list. Publishers can get revenue from contextual ads on their in-book result pages.

Publishers can opt out of having their books scanned. To give publishers time to opt-out Google's waiting until November to begin scanning books with a copyright.

Publishers are jumpy. I can understand - I prefer opt-in to opt-out myself.

Though Google's scanning books in their entirety, according to the Washington Post "Google's search service would only allow users to look up several sentences in copyrighted materials, not the entire book."

As a publisher I'd be a bit uncomfortable with Google scanning books entirely without permission. As a search geek I know that Google's more than likely to stay within fair use, but copying is copying, scanning is scanning so I can see the publishers' side on this too.

Battelle thinks publishers need to quit crying and love the Google traffic.

Anyone seen any good posts from the publishers' camp?

Two closing thoughts: any thoughts on how tough it would be to make a book scraper that could query Google's book index and get an entire book through thousands of queries? (My guess is that piecing all this together would be a biaaatch).

What do the scanning operations look like? Who's sitting there and scanning individual pages? The logistics of the operation intrigue me.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |