Study finds “Open Content Alliance” to be less open and Google Books to be less closed than expected
Kalev Leetaru has done a valuable bit of digging in this comparison of Google Books with the Open Content Alliance’s work. Conventional wisdom is that Google’s work is on a broader scale but restricted because of its commercial focus while the Open Content Alliance’s work is on a smaller scale but as “a partnership of libraries and corporate sponsors under the administration of the Internet Archive” they are thought to be the ‘good guys’, offering access “available without restriction to public access and enjoyment”. It appears however that the OCA allows its partners to (for example) prohibit unauthorised commercial use of scanned material even when that material is out of copyright, and it occasionally mis-labels out of copyright works as copyrighted (though in fairness Google may well make similar errors).
The piece provides rather more detail on the minutiae of digitization than most outside the book preservation community will find interesting, but those interested in the future of books online may find it an interesting read.