Google Books on Storyville

As part of a Stoyville series on the internet, the first was about Google's attempts to digitise the whole printed word.

It strikes me how amazingly naive the librarians involved were. You'd think that they would know at least a little about copyright law and how it applied to the digitisation process. That Google seemed as naive was also a surprise, although I imagine that they just thought it would be covered by Fair Use. It's also interesting to see where the problems were. If Google had left alone copyrighted material and, well, anything in French and German, it might have been a very different story.

Jolt Awards

The software equivalent of the Booker prize is called the Jolt Awards, given by Dr. Dobbs, an old programming magazine, and this year one of the finalists was a book I bought about six months ago, Running Lean:

which is about how to run a start-up successfully.

Another one of the finalists was this, which also seems interesting: