New York: October 22, 2007 - Google and Microsoft offered several major publishers and research libraries to scan their books into computer data bases since they declined to oblige them.

The Google has put a condition that libraries that agree to work with them must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services.

Microsoft has also placed a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form.

The Open Content Alliance, on the other hand, is making the material available to any search service.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more useful and more valuable.

The libraries can have their books scanned again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.

Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22library.html?th&emc=th