Anybody have any idea why books that were once available from Google Books are now disappearing? I saw this happen with the Adler’s Grammar that several people here at textkit were using:
and now a good 20% or so of the Loebs that were downloadable have switched to books that cannot be downloaded or read online. I have also noticed this happening with some other books that I had links to.
It disturbs me because it makes me think that Google Books is only a temporary thing, and that books you can get today may be gone tomorrow. I have downloaded many that interest me, but I’d like to know that all those that are out there right now will still be available in a couple of months/years, but who knows?
I doubt it’s a copyright issue. Adler’s Grammar is from 1858, and they key is still available. It’s just a very strange thing.
I think it still may be a copyright issue of sorts. There are publishers who had reprinted some of the books that became available through Google. They probably would not mind striking a deal with Google to keep those PDFs out of our hands.
There is also a possibility that Google will want to sell access to their content.
I wonder if they’re tired of trying to deal with the different copyright laws in different countries. Any restrictions they might put in place for a particular country are easily danced around with proxies.
I just don’t buy the copyright idea. Adler’s Grammar was written in 1858 and I can find no other editions more recent than it. In addition, the key, written by the same author and published by the same company in the same year, is still freely-downloadable.
Compare that to Gidersleeve’s and/or Allen & Greenough’s Grammars. They are both widely available in modern reprints, yet Google still has the earlier editions of those available for download (many editions, including some published 40-50 or years after Adler’s).
It all seems very strange. I’m hoping it’s a glitch in the system, not something intentional, but I have no way of knowing that.
I may be too optimistic, but I noticed that some bad scans have been updated by better scans. Adler had a lot of blurry pages, maybe (hopefully) they’re redoing it?
Related to my own experience about this problem, I have to say that when I was trying to open books from the browser, I had been getting some troubles with certain books (which were out of the copyright legislation). The buttons to download/read were not available, even if I tried to attempt it by means of a proxy. Have you been getting similar problems? Maybe they are removing the books which I referred to, I do not know.
Regards,
Gonzalo
Those were the original D’Ooge books I posted back in June. Ingrid had said that none of them would open outside the US (at least, not where she is, in the Netherlands). I still see all of those as available to me here in the US. I’m curious if you can download them either with or without a proxy.
It’s been that way for me for a long time, Amadeus. I found if I switched to Firefox and used an extension called DownThemAll, that it would ignore the kill signals they send out, aborting downloads early. I tried to tell them about this problem, but apparently since they can download anything they want from inside the building, they won’t admit anything’s wrong for us here in the outside world!
I filled out the “provide feedback” link at the bottom of the Adler page, but I didn’t leave an email address. I said, I used to be able to read it, but now I can’t. I see now that the book is back! Have the blurry pages improved? If so, it would support the theory that this phenomenon is related more to quality control than copyright.
I’m just waiting for print-on-demand terminals to replace bookstores and amazon.com Who wouldn’t love to have their favorite book printed in 3 minutes for 3 bucks?
I’ve tried downloading books (before they are gone) and they stop downlading at 20 or 30% !