Hi Anders,
Thanks for you suggestion. I can assure you that [increased] Google Books
access has been our dream from the start. It's very complicated because of
the contentious legal situation that surrounded the massive scanning and
limited sharing Google has been doing. Because of that, we haven't
prioritized increased access, however we haven't given up on the
possibility of it one day happening. One thing that would be helpful is a
personal contact with someone at Google who works on the Books program. If
you know of any Google-connected Wikipedians, please put us in touch.
Jake Orlowitz
Lead, The Wikipedia Library
User:Ocaasi
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 6:31 AM Anders Feder <anders.feder.83(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
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
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