Book People Archive

Google Book Search and Einstein Digital Reprint

Since Google Book Search has been the subject of a lot of 
discussion on this list at various times, I thought some members 
might be interested in a recent experience I had with the Google 
Book Search Team.

A few years ago, I made a PDF version of Albert Einstein's 
"Relativity: the Special and General Theory" (1920 edition). Like 
most ebooks, it didn't reproduce the pagination or line breaks of 
the original paper book. For that reason, I didn't include the 
paper book's index, since the page numbers in it wouldn't match 
the ebook's pagination.

Five or six weeks ago, I realized that the "Copyright 
Information" in the ebook was outdated. It warned that the 
original book was still under copyright in life + 50 countries. 
Since Einstein died in 1955, however, his works passed into the 
public domain in those countries on January 1st of this year. 
Rather than just update and repost the original PDF, I decided to 
make a "digital reprint" like the ones for "My Antonia" and 
"Books and Culture" that have been mentioned on this list.

Checking Google Book Search, I found a Library Project copy of 
the 1920 edition published by Henry Holt and Company. The quality 
of the page images was pretty good, but 6 pages (116-118 and 
155-157) were missing. (I relied on a paper reprint of the Holt 
edition for them.) I quickly made a digital reprint, and since 
the pagination now matched the paper book's, I could include a 
fully functional (clickable) copy of the original index. And like 
my "Books and Culture" reprint, the page numbers in the PDF were 
linked to the corresponding Google page images.

The day I was going to upload the ebook to my website, I 
discovered that Google's copy had vanished; every link to it 
returned a "Not Found" error page. After waiting about 3 weeks 
for it to reappear, I made a new version without any mention of, 
or links to, Google's copy and uploaded it to my website the day 
before Easter, replacing my old PDF from a few years ago.

The day after Easter I emailed the Google Book Search Team. I 
told them that I'd made a "digital reprint" of Einstein's book, 
and included a link to my PDF "reprint" of "Books and Culture" so 
that they could see what I meant. Then I cited this part of the 
Google Book Search Help page:

http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/help.html#17

which asks people who reuse Google's public domain books to 
"maintain the attribution to Google." The last paragraph of my 
email to them read as follows:

> In closing, let me point out that if you're going to ask people to
 "maintain the attribution to Google," you shouldn't remove books without
 any explanation.  If I'd put my first version online without noticing
 that Google's was missing, I might have gotten a number of emails,
 complaining that my ebook was full of broken links. When you remove
 books, you might want to consider substituting a page which reads
 something like this: "This book has been temporarily removed .  . ."

How did Google respond? Did they tell me not to reuse any of 
their public domain books? No. Did they tell me to buy my own 
copies or get them from libraries? No. Did they warn me not to 
scrape their scans? No. Did they tell me not to link to their 
page images because they don't want people reading their books? 
Of course not.

Their response was very courteous. First, they thanked me for 
reporting the problem. Then they explained that books may be 
removed "temporarily" for a "variety" of reasons. For instance, a 
book with quality problems might get removed for "reprocessing." 
Finally, they "assured" me that they were "working as quickly as 
possible" to get the book back online. The last line in their 
reply was, "Your continued patience and understanding are much 
appreciated." My only disappointment was that they didn't comment 
on my suggestion about "substituting a page" when books are removed.

Yesterday I checked, and Einstein's book is finally back in 
Google Book Search, so I've uploaded my original digital reprint 
which links to Google's page images. But first I added this word 
of warning to the "Note on the Text": "Google's images may not be 
available to people outside the U.S. and may be unavailable to 
U.S. residents at times."

http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Einstein/Einstein_Relativity.pdf

Note: the original book is still under copyright in countries 
that have copyright terms longer than life + 50.


Jose Menendez


P.S. Out of the 6 pages that were missing from Google's copy, 
155-157 are there now, but 116-118 are still missing. In place of 
116 and 117, duplicate images of pages 126 and 127 come up. So I 
wouldn't be surprised if it disappears again for more reprocessing.