[londons_explore]

This court case killed Google Books.

They've pretty much stopped scanning new books, even new out of copyright manuscripts etc.

Google Books itself had loads of cool possibilities of new ways to make use of the data from those books. This lawsuit has pretty much stopped all innovation, and all the good engineers left the project years ago.

[toomuchtodo]

The Internet Archive’s book scanning project is still in full swing. Yes, the indexing and presentation is not at parity, but I prefer a non-profit digital library to be the canonical reference instead of Google.

[yohui]

That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain projects, not supplanted them.

But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.

[toomuchtodo]

https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-...

[yohui]

While a good step, this only makes up for a portion of what the settlement would have allowed. (Most obviously, it appears this only covers books from a 20 year period and it takes more work to ascertain that the books are not being sold.)

Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books: https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about

[toomuchtodo]

I agree entirely, but perfect is the enemy of good enough. We can still celebrate small wins while continuing to advocate for copyright reform.

[yohui]

> perfect is the enemy of good enough

Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.

[robin_reala]

HathiTrust too has great content and indexing, it’s just a shame that it’s much slower than Google Books. But between the that and archive.org they’re a fine replacement.