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Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

We had discussed in class about how many books we thought there were in the world. This article explains how Google reached the estimated number of books.

You can use Google to search for magazines and magazine articles that date all the way back to the 1960's.

Hey, that's super-useful, Talia, thanks! When Google scanned things from research libraries, that included a lot of magazines. Or maybe Google made deals with the publishers directly for these. There are some weird titles in there, though -- no Time, no Newsweek, but you can search through _Torque_, "Singapore's best homegrown car magazine" :)

This piece of writing shows the difference between Google books and other digital content repositories, Mirlyn and Hathi Trust. And she also tells you the most efficient way to find the best sources by using all three repositories.

Great link, Jimin -- explains better than I did in class why HathiTrust is sometimes preferable to Google Books.

For those who have ever wondered how many different books are out there in the world.

Great minds think alike -- I posted the same thing. :) The estimate keeps going up, probably because more books keep being published!

Great article of why there is a drastic statistical decline in people reading e-books

For the math-phobic out there, don't let the word scare you. An "algorithm" is nothing more than a set of instructions, just like a recipe or how-to book.And the Internet relies on many, many algorithms in order to function properly. When you type search terms into Google, it follows a very complex algorithm to determine which results to show you.