In its 'mission' to "organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible," search behemoth Google is now eyeing the Hindi book segment for digitization as part of its Book Search initiative...."We don't currently have any Hindi language books in our search programme as we have just begun discussions with Hindi language publishers. We will have the service available once we have a critical mass of Hindi language books," says Gautam Anand, strategic partner development manager, Google Inc....What will the publishers gain through this programme? "Publishers can avail of the benefits of this free marketing programme as the details of a publisher will be published. Anybody from anywhere in the world can contact the publisher," says Anand.
"This will definitely help Hindi publishers as they will be able to reach out to more people interested in Hindi books," says Shakti Malik, President, Federation of Indian publishers. In a recent interaction with publishers from various parts of country on the sidelines of the World Book Fair in New Delhi, Google was flooded with enquiries about the programme in other Indian languages. Google says that it is thinking about it.
"We hope to include other languages as well. It is not incumbent upon the response we get from Hindi language publishers, but on when we feel comfortable that the OCR technology is in a state where we can accurately index books in other regional languages," says Anand....According to Google, the response from the Indian publishers has been encouraging. "We started discussions with Indian publishers this year at the Frankfurt Book Fair and the response has been extremely positive," says Anand.
(PS: Note that this is the opt-in Google Publisher program, not the opt-out Google Library program.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/09/2006 01:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
