An interesting thing happened at my place of work (OhioLINK) today. We recently added links to our central catalog pointing to manifestations in Google Books. The way it was decided to set it up, though, was to only point to Google Books if the full text was available. We tweeted about it to let our community know that this option was now available. The tweet included a link to a particular record that showed (at the time) an example of this change: Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.
Others picked up on the tweet and word got around. This morning I noticed a comment on one of those tweets via FriendFeed — the link to the full text was no longer visible on our sample record. Odd, I thought, and I started poking around. Other items in our catalog still showed the link to full text in Google Books. And the same record in Kent State University’s catalog, using the same linking mechanism, had a link to the item in Google Books, but — and this is the kicker — now only in “snippet” view. And that is probably the appropriate view given the copyright date of 1951.
What we’re guessing is that the book was erroneously in full view mode in Google Books. The large number of hits — caused by it being the example record in OhioLINK’s blog posts and tweets — triggered some sort of usage alarm at Google Headquarters, where someone (or some algorithm) took a second look at the classification of the item and changed the view from full to snippet.
In any case, we tweeted a second example that, given its copyright year of 1918, will most likely remain in full view mode.
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I can’t see the Google Book link for Pride and Prejudice either! Is it just me? Or does somebody at Google hate you?
I noticed that Google has an earlier (1923) edition of Life on the Mississippi too, also apparently without full text; shouldn’t that be out of copyright?
Conal — When I look at the catalog record as of 8:20am EDT this morning, the link to “Read at Google Books” is there. We are inserting this into the page via HTML, so you might want to be sure that JavaScript is enabled. The BrowserSpy JavaScript page will help. You should see at least “Generic JavaScript support” and JavaScript through version 1.3 support. If not, please let me know the UserAgent result and the Operating System result from BrowserSpy’s UserAgent Information page. We’ll try to sort out why it isn’t working for you based on that information.
Regarding the 1923 edition, the rule of thumb is that a work is in the public domain if published and copyrighted before 1923. For 1923 and after, the question of in copyright or not gets considerably more interesting. An overview of the complexity is at Cornell’s Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States page.
I’m running Firefox 3.5 on Windows. My HTTP user agent string is:
I definitely have Javascript enabled though. When I switched on FireBug (the JS debugger) and stepped through the code, I noticed that it was looking for div elements with class attributes of “gbs”, but there were no such divs in the HTML, and that seems to be why it failed.
I hope that helps.
Oh my lord. US Copyright law is even stupider than I thought. As if the “author’s life + 70 years” rule wasn’t restrictive enough.
I bet Sam Clemens is enjoying those fat royalty checks OH WAIT, HE’S BEEN DEAD FOR ALMOST 100 YEARS MY BAD. I know the US likes to pretend that corporations are people, but it’s hard to argue that anyone, much less society as a whole, actually benefits from this foolishness.
so what’s the trickery that makes you able to link the catalog record with the google book?
Caleb — Thomas Dowling copied it from Kent State’s KentLINK. I’m not sure where it originated…
I thought I noticed this happening too with a link I had used as an example, but wasn’t sure if I had just gotten confused or what. Thanks for another data point.
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