VTO, the German Google Book Search Killer?
Jodok and me just returned from a meeting with Rüdiger Salat and Sandra Dittert. Rüdiger is part of the “Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchandels” and also member of the executive board of the “Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck Gmbh“. So Rüdiger was quite through the roof because of a story which Mathias Schindler broke yesterday about VTO . To keep it short, the Börsenverein is the association of booksellers and publisher of germany and they are working on a project, Volltextsucheonline (VTO) which is trying to be a german answer against google books. Mathias managed to get hold of a powerpoint presentation which one of the officials of the VTO project did and (un)fortunately also includes an admin user login and password. So the story Mathias broke basically includes how to download a book from VTO without doing any basic hacking. This is a very sensitive thing because the Börsenverein took part in a lawsuit against google which was exactly about downloading whole books or pictures from google books. So there is a couple of things which we can say about this whole topic at the moment:
- the powerpoint presentation is still online whereas the indian development team just managed to disable the logins. We witnessed the communication process and it seems that the indians are up already whereas the germans are sleeping already ;-)
- the “Börsenverein” guys are really stupid…. i mean…. how can you put a presentation like that online?
- the VTO project is still in beta and not released yet… so what??? Mathias you managed to sneak into a login and managed to download a book…. so what?
- to us, it looks like someone is really trying to kick ass of the VTO project.
We all know google and we all know who is behind google. Did anyone who owns google write a book? The Börsenverein is representing publishers and the point is, they are not a private company. They are trying to get books online and they are trying to do this in an decentralized way. So even if the software is centralized, the company structure behind it, is not. Google really is heavily centralized even if the software is not. So why should a company like Lovely Systems and persons like Jodok and me and almost anyone else be against VTO and for Google Books? No clue. Guys, if you want to hack, hack VTO and let the responsible people know what the point is, but do not make the mistake to praise google and make VTO down.
Hi. Thanks for you post. It is very interesting. I just wanted to give you an answer on
“# the VTO project is still in beta and not released yet… so what??? Mathias you managed to sneak into a login and managed to download a book…. so what?”
Well, this download feature does not have anything to do with VTO and its beta status. If at all, it has to do with MPS BookStore (which is not beta). The same procedure works at http://www.macmillannewwritingbookstore.com/ which does not claim to be beta.
I am not “against” VTO or “for” GBS. If you read my blog post about the talk Jens Redmer gave in Mainz a while ago, you could hardly consider this “praising”.
If there is anything you or your friends would like to talk about without using a public forum, you can email me at mathias.schindler@wikimedia.de.
Errata: Oh, actually, macmillan’s store does claim to be beta (as of today).
“is now beta”….yea, think your post had some effect ;-)
i don’t know what about you, but i would certainly love to have books online because i know for sure that it will spark a lot of innovation. We know of one player which is google and we know of another one which is VTO. I don’t need to help google to do the job, but it looks like the VTO people might need some help to get their service straight. We had some internal discussions here and identified three technical core problems concerning security:
1. retrieving pages of a book and encoding it in url calls.
2. retrieval of page sequences through search results of common words.
3. display the information without making it accessible for download.
I guess there are some technical cracks on our blog. Someone has an idea how to solve the stuff above?
Germans do not develop any Google-Killer. We simply dont’ have the ideas and the guts to really CREATE something that could stop Google. Maybe there are some people in Germany who have good ideas, and maybe there are some people with guts. But they don’t have the power to do something relevant.
We are the StudiVZ Nation. We are the country of clones.
[...] Im Lovely Systems Blog kann am einen unterhaltsamen Artikel über “VTO - the german google book search killer” lesen. Der Inhalt ist eigentlich weniger interessant als die Tatsache, dass sich wieder wer auf macht einen Google-Killer zu programmieren. Ich hab gleich einen Kommentar dargelassen und mal frank und frei behauptet, dass Deutsche keine Google-Killer bauen würden. Deutsche bauen überhaupt nichts, was auch nur im entferntesten in die Nähe von Google kommt. Wir sind die StudiVZ-Nation, wir leben im Klon-Land. [...]
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