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:

1. 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 ;-)
2. the “Börsenverein” guys are really stupid…. i mean…. how can you put a presentation like that online?
3. 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?
4. 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.