With Open Platform, Stanford Seeks to Reclaim MOOC Brand; Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/4/13

Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education; With Open Platform, Stanford Seeks to Reclaim MOOC Brand: "Now Stanford is looking to reclaim some leadership in the MOOC movement from the private companies down the street. For some of its offerings it has started using Open edX, the open-source platform developed by edX, an East Coast nonprofit provider of MOOCs. And Stanford is marshaling its resources and brainpower to improve its own online infrastructure. In doing so, the university is putting its weight behind an open-source alternative that could help others develop MOOCs independently of proprietary companies. Why? "There are people who are uncomfortable for a range of reasons," says Jane Manning, director of platforms for Stanford Online, the university's new online-learning arm. "They've seen what happened on the research side of the house with the academic publishers, where academic publishers ended up having a lot of pricing power.""

Library Organizations Urge DoJ To Take Proactive Role in Google Book Search Settlement; Library Journal, 8/6/09

Norman Oder via Library Journal; Library Organizations Urge DoJ To Take Proactive Role in Google Book Search Settlement:

Groups express concerns about pricing, composition of Book Rights Registry:

"Letter follows up on May meeting.

DoJ should treat settlement as consent decree.

OCA asks Google to request delay in hearing."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6675219.html

Barnes & Noble Plans an Extensive E-Bookstore; New York Times, 7/21/09

Motoko Rich via New York Times; Barnes & Noble Plans an Extensive E-Bookstore:

"In an announcement on Monday, Barnes & Noble said that it would offer more than 700,000 books that could be read on a wide range of devices, including Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry and various laptop or desktop computers. When Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise in March, that online retailer had about 60,000 books in its catalog.

More than 500,000 of the books now offered electronically on BN.com can be downloaded free, through an agreement with Google to provide electronic versions of public domain books that Google has scanned from university libraries. Sony announced a similar deal in March to offer the public domain books on its Reader device.

Barnes & Noble is promoting its e-bookstore as the world’s largest, an implicit stab at Amazon.com, which offers about 330,000 for its Kindle device. Currently, Google’s public domain books cannot be read on a Kindle."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/technology/internet/21book.html?_r=1&hpw

Critics: Google Book Deal a Monopoly, Privacy Debacle; Wired.com, 6/2/09

Ryan Singel via Wired.com; Critics: Google Book Deal a Monopoly, Privacy Debacle:

"Google set out to digitize the world’s books in 2003, got sued for its trouble in 2005 by publishers and authors wanting to make money from the efforts, and in 2007 came to a proposed settlement that gives Google the rights to scan, index, display and even sell millions of books that are in copyright. So far its Google Book Search program has digitized around 10 million books from the some of the nation’s most prestigious university libraries, but only small portions of most in-copyright books are shown online currently.

(Learn more with Wired.com’s Google Book Search Settlement FAQ.)

Even the deal’s critics — such as New York University professor James Grimmelmann — admit that the deal sounds great: Books in copyright but out-of-print become available for viewing and purchase by the public, and researchers and students at universities will get access to the full technology.

But Grimmelmann, whose Google Book Search research has been funded by Microsoft, says that the Google deal gives it exclusive rights to books that are in copyright whose authors can’t be found — so-called orphan works — and that any competitor who wants to try the same project could get sued for huge sums of money.

That makes a monopoly, Grimmelmann told conference goers at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington, D.C. Tuesday."

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/google_books/

UMich Gets Better Deal in Google’s Library of the Future Project; Wired.com, 5/21/09

Ryan Singel via Wired.com; UMich Gets Better Deal in Google’s Library of the Future Project:

"The new Google-UM agreement (.pdf) gives the university a digital copy of every book on its shelves, regardless of whether Google scanned its copy or another library’s. The school gets more rights to distribute its copies of the digitized works, and, most importantly for Google public relations, a way for the school to protest the pricing scheme of full-text institutional subscriptions to the millions of digitized books.

University of Michigan is one of the largest of the 29 libraries who have been digitizing public-domain and in-copyright books in conjunction with Google Book Search."

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/umich-gets-better-deal-in-googles-library-of-the-future-project/