Friday, August 20, 2010

The Bizarre Case of Google Books Unavailable Outside the U.S.

Over on the NT Gateway blog, I noted yesterday that William Wrede's Paul is now available in toto on Google Books. Accordingly, I added a link to the Paul: Books and Articles page. But then it appeared that a lot of people were unable to access the book. In comments, Holger Szesnat, my colleague on the NT Gateway, noted:
In my experience, most google books that are available in full view in the U.S.A. are not accessible outside of that country. I don’t even get ’snippet’ view of the ET of Wrede’s book. The publication date seems to make no difference. Particularly galling when, as I once noticed, a scan had been made at the Bodleian library in Oxford, but UK web visitors would be prevented from accessing the google book scan. Even worse when you live on the other side of the globe, with absolute no way of reading that book.

One thing that U.S.-based people can do though is this: download the google books PDF, and then upload it to archive.org – from where it is accessible to anyone. So much for google’s supposed copyright concern behind all this, incidentally. The German original is available on that site already: http://www.archive.org/details/pauluswred00wred

The rest of us (i.e. those who do not live in google-land) can use proxy servers like hotspot shield to get around the problem – as long as you are prepared to put up with slow speed and annoying advertisements.
Well, this was news to me. I am really surprised that books like this, over one hundred years old, are not showing up in some countries. I realize, of course, that copyright laws differ from country to country. Nevertheless, I am curious to know how widespread this kind of difference between Google Books at home and abroad is. Anyone else experienced this?

Now, if anyone would like to upload the PDF of Wrede's book to archive.org, it would be great to hear from you. As an interim measure, I have uploaded the PDF to my web space here:

W. Wrede, Paul (translated by E. W. Lummis; London: Philip Green, 1907) [PDF]

Update (14.01): Roger Pearse comments.
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4 comments:

  1. AKMA20 August 2010 at 11:13

    I noticed this last year when I was trying to use some 19th-century translations of Judaica for one of my courses, and again this spring when I was looking for "Bible History" books from the public domain, to adapt to my own nefarious purposes for a Bible intro course. But of course, that merely reinforces (rather than extends) Holger’s point, since he’s UK-based too.

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  2. Rick Sumner20 August 2010 at 11:20

    For books that haven't been uploaded elsewhere another easy fix is to use a web proxy. They require no technical knowledge, there are a ton of them around (just google them), and almost all of them are US based. It's the best way to browse Google books too.

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  3. Mark Goodacre20 August 2010 at 14:00

    Thanks for the helpful remarks, Roger. I suppose my own naiveté resulted in part from the fact that I moved to the US just as the Google Books revolution was getting into full swing. And the fact that so much stuff that appeared on Google Books was then turning up on archive.org masked me from seeing what was happening. Cf., for example, my post about the Oxyrhynchus volumes on archive.org. Presumably the Google Books versions of those are blocked outside the US too?

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  4. Mark Goodacre20 August 2010 at 15:10

    I noticed, thanks. Yes, good point.

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