Perhaps a more attainable goal would be for Wikipedians to gain access to
books NOT UNDER COPYRIGHT that Google has scanned and restricted. Pretty
much everything 1922 and earlier they have been good about making public
(1908 and earlier for the UK) but there are a vast number of titles which
are copyright clear for this reason or that for the 1923 to 1973 period
that they have hidden behind "snippet view." There is absolutely no
plausible copyright reason for them acting thus and that case might be made
much more easily than a dubious appeal to release files of copyrighted
materials because Wikipedians are on the side of the angels.
Just a thought.
Tim Davenport
Corvallis, OR
"Carrite" on WP
Hi,
I have a little idea that could be really helpful for Wikipedians if it
could be implemented. Google has scanned in a vast collection of books
<http://www.google.com/googlebooks/library/>. Some of these scanned pages
can be read online via Google Books, and serves an important resource for
Wikipedians confirming the verifiability of text added to Wikipedia.
However, many of the scanned pages can *not* be read: in some cases only an
arbitrary selection of pages in a given book can be read, which may not be
the ones need; in other cases, pages can not be read at all or they can
only be searched in the severely limited "Snippet View".
Now, there are good reasons why this is the case. The books copyrighted,
and the rightsholders do not want to give their most important goods away
for free to anyone on the internet. However, given Google's support for
Wikipedia, and for the open dissemination of knowledge, could Wikipedia
Library perhaps approach Google and request a much more limited
arrangement, like the ones it has with various journals?
Full access to all books in the Google Books Library Project would be
utopic. But even a limited deal where a short range of pages can be
requested for each book would be extremely helpful, because page numbers
are specified countless references on Wikipedia via the {{cite book}}
template - we just do not have a way to easily get those pages. Yet.
Thank you,
Anders Feder