> The largest truly open library in human history
“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.
Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely.
Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled.
So blame publishers, not Google.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
It’s preposterous, and offensive to anyone’s intelligence to claim that this is about incentivizing production; does anyone seriously believe there is a potential artist out there who would avoid making their magnum opus if it could only be under copyright for 119 years?
This isn't like web search where web pages are publicly available and so Google can return search results across whatever it wants. For books, it relies on publisher cooperation to both supply book contents for indexing under license and give permissions for preview. If publishers say to turn off search, Google turns off search.
"The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will become harder and harder to find with time, so clip your own copies of everything you like to quote."
Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content.
Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.
Your comment reflects the old “information wants to be free” ideals that used to dominate places like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit. But since LLMs arrived, a lot of the loudest voices here argue the opposite position when it comes to training data.
I’ve been trying to understand whether people have actually changed their views, or whether it’s mostly a shift in who is speaking up now.
But as a pirate, I specialize in finding hidden, hard to find, or otherwise lost sources. They're not making anybody any money, and I absolutely do not sell anything thats not mine (freely given).
But having every commercial work available for ingestion into an LLM is an amazing way to train an AI. However if you're going to use piracy at scale to train, you should also not be able to sell the LLM or access to it.
And yeah, that wrecks every corporate LLM strategy. Boo fucking hoo.
Do creators need paid for content they create? Ideally, yes! Do they deserve iron-fisted control of your hardware (DRM) to enact their demands? Fuck no!
Ideally, the LLMs would be FLOSS, full weights published, lists of content used to reproduce, etc. We could prune bad content and add more good. But the problem again is whoever does this must violate copyright cause copyright in the way its implemented is terrible.
In reality, I like the RIAA's congressional solution. You send a check for how many plays you did to BMI/ASCAP and you're good. That could be extended to books and shows. If that were done, you could have a New-Flix service that literally has every show and movie in existence. You just pay a reasonable cost per month to access the whole of video humanity.
Alas. Guess I'll have to build it myself.
maybe a short copyright would be fine (10 year fixed?) but copyright as-is seems indefensible to me
William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible into English, which would have been an act to make information open and accessible.
(a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all references of your search in that book.
(b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.
Then it would have been hella useful.
Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.
If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.
That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them), and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book beyond the standard preview pages.
But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and built up their collections...
"Hey, remove search?"
"OK, it was costing money anyways."
More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust
Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?
"But a few days ago they removed ALL search functions for any books with previews, which are disproportionately modern books." <emphasis mine>
Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to make copyright once again a net benefit for society.
Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview search was switched off by accident.
For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at archive.org.
I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books - it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.
Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.
