The Race to the Shelf Continues

The Open Content Alliance and Amazon.com by Beth Ashmore, Cataloging Librarian, Samford University &Jill E. Grogg, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries .

Taken from Information Today, via Library Link of the Day.

Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Amazon are in the middle of nothing short of a modern-day space race: Who can scan the most and the best books in alliance with the biggest and brightest libraries in the U.S. — nay, the world! — while simultaneously providing print on demand, “find in a library,” and “buy the book” links as well? The amount of press and controversy surrounding the Google Book Search Library Project tends to overshadow one detail — while these companies may have begun the race to the shelf, they certainly did not invent book digitization. Look no further than Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg, which celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2006 and expanded its reach to Canada in July 2007, to know that book digitization is nothing new. But, as with almost all things these big internet companies touch, the stakes have been raised significantly.

While Google seems to rack up an increasingly impressive list of library and industry partners [See “Google Book Search Libraries and Their Digital Copies: What Now?” at http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr07/Grogg_Ashmore.shtml for a description of the Google Book Search library partners — then], the Open Content Alliance, or OCA, is giving Google a run for its money. OCA comes armed with an open access philosophy and its own impressive stable of partners, including Yahoo! and, at least initially, Microsoft. Amazon, the dark horse in the race, as scanning and making books available for free online would seem antithetical to its book-selling roots, has gotten into the act, offering to partner with libraries to help scan and sell rare and hard-to-find books from library collections. Under Amazon’s model, the libraries retain their own digital copies along with a portion of any print-on-demand profits. Ultimately, librarians now have choices when it comes to large-scale digitization partnerships.

Open Content Alliance: Background
The Internet Archive (IA), under the leadership of cofounder and director Brewster Kahle, began the OCA in 2005 with the initial goal of extending IA’s reach “to help bring digital materials online or take the ‘born digital’ and help make them more readily accessible” into the world of book digitization. The 501(c)3 nonprofit Internet Archive did not stick to the non-profit sector for partners — counting Yahoo! as one of its founders and Microsoft as an early (though now ex-) partner in the Alliance. Kahle described the IA’s mission as “born out of the digital opportunity of universal access to all knowledge. The idea of getting all the books, music, video on the Net and making them accessible to people anywhere … that’s where we’re coming from.”
The OCA counts no fewer than 44 libraries in the Alliance.

At first glance, this may seem relatively similar to the Google Book Search Library Project equation: Internet giant + massive library collections = a world of previously untapped searching content. But the similarities pretty much end there. From partners to access models to future plans, OCA offers a different spin on the world’s print knowledge brought online. The OCA is designed to bring together libraries, publishers, and online stakeholders to create joint open repositories of content — with particular emphasis on open. OCA’s approach to this process has two major differences that set it apart from the Google Book Search Library Project: no scanning of in-copyright materials from library collections (at least not yet) and open access is the guiding principle — meaning that even Google itself could (and does) crawl titles from the OCA repository.

There is much more so if the subject interest you use this ink.