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Internet search giant Yahoo responded Monday to rival Google's plans to make books available for reading online by introducing its own version.
The key difference: Yahoo is not scanning copyrighted works, as Google did before publishers called foul and it temporarily stopped. Instead, Yahoo is paying for the scanning of older, out of print titles and making them searchable through the Yahoo index and a new website at opencontentalliance.org.
"I would have loved to have seen Google take this approach from the very beginning," says Danny Sullivan, editor of the SearchEngineWatch website. "Instead of just working on their own, they should have been collaborative and found a way to work together with everyone."
Unlike Google's Print project, search results from Open Content Alliance's (OCA) books will be made available to all Internet search engines.
The OCA is spearheaded by the non-profit Internet Archive, which is compiling digital collections for researchers and the public.
Members of the OCA include Yahoo, the University of California, University of Toronto, Adobe Systems and Hewlett-Packard.
"The idea is to create a permanent library that's available to everybody," says Internet Archive founder Brewster Khale. "You can take a classic work of American literature, download it, print it and even bind it if you want to."
"As more books are made available, we expect consumption to increase," says David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search content.
Google began its library program in 2004 by cutting deals with several universities, including the University of Michigan, Harvard and Oxford, to digitize many books, both in and out of print, and make them searchable at Google.
Google has since been sued by the Authors Guild over copyright infringement. It has suspended plans to scan copyrighted books for the program until Nov. 1, but Google says it is still scanning books at the request of publishers.
In response to the Yahoo announcement, Google said it welcomed efforts to make more information available to users.
USA Today
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