Open Content Alliance

Google (http://print.google.com) is not the only big-player tech company scanning books these days, now Yahoo is joining in the fun according to this NYT article. Partners in both projects are heavy hitters, in this case (the Open Content Alliance – www.opencontentalliance.org) the names include the Internet Archive. If you are not familiar with the Internet Archive, check it out (www.archive.org) as well as the free ccPublisher tool from Creative Commons that lets users directly publish content for FREE to the Internet Archive.

Three big differences between the Open Content Alliance project and Google Print are:

1. OCA is making scanned books accessible to ANY search engine, not just one (like Google Print.)
2. Unlike the Google Print project that just scans “snippets” of books, the Open Content Alliance is scanning entire works with Creative Commons licenses granted from the author/publisher.
3. THE OCA is working with content publishers and soliciting their permission to redistribute / republish from the start.

This is the biggest difference between the Open Content Alliance project and the Google Print project. Sounds like a much more reasonable approach, less likely to be prone to the lawsuit woes plaguing Google Print. The NYT article reports that around 15% of the holdings in many libraries are already in the public domain. Digitizing these resources is very exciting, and will further expand the electronic resources available worldwide to every Internet user.

The times they are continuing to change…..