Sunday, July 26, 2009

Author of Family History Unhappy with Google Library Project

Link to July 26 Capital Times article, "Is Google-UW book deal fair to authors?"

Excerpt: UW-Madison joined the Google project in 2006, and expanded its agreement with the company on July 8. To date, the university has digitized about 200,000 works from University Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society -- including a 177-page book Fevens authored and owns the copyright to: "Fevens, a family history."

The 55-year-old unemployed carpenter, lobster fisherman and jack-of-all-trades living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, stumbled across his work in the Google book archives on May 13 while poking around the Internet.

According to Fevens, the Google book search indicated that the online copy of "Fevens, a family history" had been scanned from UW-Madison's archives.

Although the whole book wasn't available online -- only a few lines of text, or what Google calls "snippets," were shown -- Fevens was nonetheless outraged.

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