[pd-discuss] Hathitrust locks public domain books; amasses scans from others, and gives full access only to partners members

Tue Jun 21 16:16:18 UTC 2011

On Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:53 -0400, "Peter B. Hirtle" <pbh6 at cornell.edu>
wrote:

> Furthermore, there is nothing that prevents you from identifying a title
> of interest in HathiTrust and then downloading the PDF from Google. 
[...]
many PUBLIC DOMAIN books scanned by googlebooks (accessible in
hathitrust only to PAYING MEMBERS) are not accessible (even if in public
domain) in googlebooks web interface. This is the point, since
googlebooks does not care to investigate about public domain status and
left many PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS in snippet view. I guess this is the MAIN
attractive for people paying hathitrust to access to books unaccessible
via googlebooks. I obtained to unlock a public domain books left in
snippet view erroneosly, but ONE WHOLE YEAR has passed to unlock from
the part of googlebooks!

> you can digitize the title yourself and make your digital copy freely available to the world.
[...]
you are a wise man and you cannot speak in these terms too simplistic,
since you know that is not possible for everyone find a certain book and
scan. Hathitrust is a big anomaly in public domain books world and it
really exclude tons of public domain books from FULL ACCESS free
browsing (browsing page by page and in LOW RES is not ENOUGH)

once again, you are considering the questions from point of view of
people able to access to FULL PDF, while you must assume the point of
view of poor people studying in universities not able to spend for
joining to hathitrust to view books in PUBLIC DOMAIN, and  of persons
affiliated not to any university. Are these people unworthy to have
access to PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS?

Hathitrust, from this point of view has chosen a very wrong business
model
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