Earth Class Mail, a Seattle-based company that delivers physical mail digitally announced today that it is working with Kansas City, MO-based Perfect Output to create a combined document and mail-processing service. Financial details were not released. Earth Class Mail, which creates digital forms of paper letters and mail for businesses, will provide key technology for Perfect Output’s document-management service.  According to the release, Earth Class Mail’s system saves companies 75 percent on document storage and retrieval costs.

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The biggest development in the digital media world this week, by far, was the settlement of a pair of class-action copyright-infringement lawsuits brought against Google in 2005 by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and several publishing houses. The compromise agreement, which was announced October 28 and now awaits approval by the federal courts, could eventually result in improved access to books, especially the millions of books that are no longer in print but are still covered by U.S. copyrights. It promises to free Google to move forward with its ambitious library digitization effort, which will put a vast collection of literature at the fingertips of students, researchers, and at least a few public library patrons. It should also placate the Chicken Littles in the publishing industry, who have spent years using every available means, including the Google lawsuit itself, to obstruct the sharing of knowledge enabled by the digital revolution.

But for readers—the group whose interests are closest to my own heart, and the only major class of stakeholders in the lawsuit whose interests weren’t being protected by a team of well-paid attorneys—the Book Search settlement contains some major disappointments. I should emphasize that I am not a lawyer, and I have only spent a few hours studying the settlement agreement. (It’s 323 pages long, which may explain why it took the parties more than two years to negotiate a solution.) But I’m saddened by the gap between the level of open access to literature that was considered possible when Google first launched its project to digitize millions of library books and what we’re probably going to get as a result of this agreement.

Specifically, the settlement seems to put an end to hopes that the Google Library Project would result in widespread free or low-cost electronic access to books that are out of print but have not yet passed into the public domain. These books—and there are millions of them—are in a painful state of limbo. They’re deemed commercially non-viable by their original publishers, so you can’t find them in most bookstores. Yet no one else can republish them without getting permission from the original copyright holders or their heirs or assignees—and for many so-called “orphan works,” these rightsholders can’t even be identified or located. So the only way to read one of these books is to find a copy at a used bookseller, or figure out which public or academic library owns a copy, and then physically travel there.

The hope was that Google—consistent with its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—would simplify access to these out-of-print but still-presumptively-copyrighted books by sharing their full text over the Internet at little or no cost to readers, the same way it does with the public-domain books it has digitized. (Under U.S. law, the copyright on all works published before January 1, 1923, has irrevocably expired, and Google lets readers peruse and download these books for free. If you click here, for example, you can read my favorite novel of all time, E.M. Forster’s 1910 masterpiece Howards End.)

If Google had chosen to take the lawsuit to trial and prevailed, it might have been at liberty to do this, monetizing the practice (just as it monetizes all of its other services) through keyword-based advertising. Such a service would have been a great boon to readers everywhere. Indeed, when I interviewed a bunch of librarians about the Google initiative back in 2005, before the lawsuit, most of them were ecstatic: they’d been waiting for years for someone to come along and help them put their collections online. I bet Google could even have charged a little something for the service—after all, nobody else is trying to scan so many library books (7 million of them so far).

Alas, the nation’s authors and publishers organized a campaign to stop Google. Letting avarice run roughshod over common sense and the common good, the plaintiffs in Authors Guild et al. v. Google and McGraw Hill et al. v. Google argued that the very act of scanning an in-copyright book without the rightsholder’s permission is an egregious copyright violation. Even the short snippets of text that Google Book Search serves up among its search results were too much for these groups to stomach. (This despite the fact that the courts long ago ratified the inclusion of snippets in general Web search results as an example of “fair use” under copyright law.)

It quickly became clear that the plaintiffs in the lawsuits would sooner see out-of-print books remain in limbo forever than sacrifice one penny of potential profit to Google. No matter that these authors and publishers weren’t even marketing the books Google was scanning: if the rightsholders themselves couldn’t figure out how to make money on their out-of-print titles, no upstart search-gizmo company was going to, either.

It may surprise you that, as a writer, I’m on Google’s side in this dispute. But my point of view is that decent writers can always find ways to get paid for their work. They shouldn’t have to leech off the people who …Next Page »

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After 16 months in business, Xconomy has published about 3,400 pages of articles. At this pace, we’ll get to 1.8 million pages in about 700 years. But the Encyclopedia of Life—a new scientific and educational website that will have one page for every species on the planet—intends to hit that number in just 10 years. And even then, it will only be getting started: while biologists have named, described, and catalogued some 1.8 million critters, they estimate that another 8 million species of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, protists, viruses, and archaea remain undiscovered.

That’s a seriously big website. We’re talking Wikipedia big. (The famous free online encyclopedia, begun in 2000, has 2.6 million articles in English alone, and over 10 million all told.) Which means the organizers of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL for short) are going to have to throw out the old playbook in taxonomy—the slow and meticulous science of species classification, born 250 years ago this year with the publication of Karl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae—and turn to the techniques of Web 2.0.

Specifically, they’re going to have to rely on thousands of amateur naturalists to collect and submit data for the encyclopedia. But that creates a fascinating problem: How do you partake of the revolution in “user-generated content,” as Wikipedia has done, while keeping the material you publish wholly factual and stable—as it ought to be if the Encyclopedia of Life is to be a useful resource for scientists, students, and policy makers, and as Wikipedia manifestly is not? I’ve been reading up on the EOL project this week, and as far as I can tell, the organizers haven’t yet worked out a thorough answer to that question.

Of course, not all of the material in EOL will be user-generated. A big part of the concept for the encyclopedia, a $40 million project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is that it will be a classic Web 2.0 “mashup.” You’re probably familiar with RSS news readers, which assemble headlines and stories from hundreds of separate websites; in a similar way, EOL will use Web-based aggregation technology under development at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, to suck in and recompile information from existing online species databases, such as the uBio NameBank, iSpecies, FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, and North American Mammals.

Another big part of EOL involves digitizing millions of print books and journal articles in 10 of the world’s leading natural history libraries, including the Harvard University Botany Libraries and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology here in Cambridge (the full list is here). The hope is that once this information has been scanned, run through optical-character recognition software, and automatically tagged with the appropriate metadata, it will be possible to access passages from the scientific literature from the relevant species pages in EOL. Say you’re researching Nicrophorus americanus, the American Burying Beetle—a colorful but critically endangered species for which there’s already a very nice page at EOL. The encyclopedia may lead you to, among other resources, a detailed description published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1853.

The problem is that scanning, classifying, editing, and mashing together all of that material is going to take years, especially given that it’s all being done on the cheap (EOL and digitization partner, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, have nothing like the amount of money Google is spending on its Book Search project). But “EOL must show some results and value quickly” if it is to be taken seriously by scientists, funders, and the public at large, as the project’s own planning documents acknowledge.

It’s hard to see how the current plan, spelled out in the planning documents and the project’s FAQ page, will accomplish that. Each species page is to have a volunteer “curator,” a competent scientist responsible for authenticating information submitted by contributors before it’s published. Unfortunately, the world population of trained taxonomists is only about 6,000, according to E. O. Wilson, the famed Harvard biologist who conceived EOL and is the project’s honorary chairman. So if you left the curating to the real experts, they’d each have …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Earth Class Mail, which digitizes paper mail and delivers it via the Internet, has announced it has raised $5.1 million in angel investment led by Keiretsu Forum. Earth Class Mail also said it has increased staffing by 35 percent in the past two quarters to keep up with demand from corporate and government customers.

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I am not a David Allen disciple, but the one practice I did adopt after reading his time-management bible Getting Things Done many years ago was to start a filing system for the stacks of papers that used to cause a distracting mess around my home and office. As a result, I’ve got about six boxes full of neatly labeled file folders—most of which I will probably never open again, but which I can’t part with. After all, you never know when you might need that tax return from 1996 or that old report card from your puppy’s obedience school. (Five paws! What a good dog! Can’t throw that away!)

Now there’s a company in Waltham, MA, that will scan and digitize all of your old papers, taking them off your hands once and for all and uploading them to the great computing cloud in the sky, where they can then be accessed from any Web browser. It’s called Pixily, and it charges about $15 for every 50 pages you want to send in for digitization, postage included. Founders Prasad Thammineni, Vikram Kumar, and Anand Rajaram started the company last year and have been talking it up more since its official July launch, starring in a video for the Boston Globe and doing a main dish presentation at the latest Web Innovators Group meeting (where they won the “audience favorite” award). And while their service might not usher you into the Nirvana of pure paperlessness, it will at least stem the tide.

The self-funded startup isn’t the first to offer industrial-scale conversion of paper into bits. Boston’s Iron Mountain, for example, offers document conversion services for records that companies don’t need to put into the company’s secure underground vaults. But that service starts at $700 a month, according to Rajaram—a bit out of most consumers’ price range. “There isn’t anybody that really does [document conversion] for consumers and small businesses,” Rajaram says. “And more importantly, none of the other services are really suited for search. Just because something is archived doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be searchable.”

Search capabilities, in fact, are what bring Pixily’s service alive. Its website acts like a portal to your once paper-laden life, showing snippets of each document that you can browse and search, just as you would with Web pages. Like Evernote, an online note-keeping service I reviewed in July, Pixily runs every document that you archive (whether it’s a paper document you mailed in for scanning, or a PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document that you uploaded yourself) through character-recognition and indexing software.

That means, for example, that if you need to retrieve the name of that restaurant where you blew $250 six months ago, you can type “250″ into Pixily’s search engine, and it will instantly find and highlight the relevant line on your credit-card statement. Try doing that with your paper file system.

“Everyone has a different take on the paper problem,” says Rajaram. “You either spent time organizing your papers, or you spend time searching through them.”

The idea that Rajaram and his colleagues hit on in mid-2007, he says, was to build a service that automates both. That the three were able to turn the idea into a company so quickly—and without having to raise outside money—is partly thanks to the rise of cloud computing technology. Other than the machines that run its scanners, Pixily doesn’t own a single server: it processes incoming documents using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a utility computing service introduced by the e-retail giant in 2006, and stores them on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

That means the company can requisition additional computing capacity whenever it’s needed—and avoid buying a lot of hardware that would just sit idle at other times. “Cloud computing is one of the trends that makes an operation like ours possible,” Rajaram says. “Say it’s tax time and …Next Page »

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If there’s one thing New England has in great supply, it’s books. And that makes the area one of the battlegrounds in the digital library wars—the competition between commercial entities such as Google and Microsoft and non-profit groups such as the Internet Archive to secure agreements to scan, digitize, and distribute the world’s print literature. This week a large subset of the region’s libraries threw their weight behind the non-profit camp, signaling the growing resistance to Google’s professed goal of organizing “all the world’s information.”

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 state, college, institutional, and university libraries around New England, announced Monday that it has chosen the Open Content Alliance (OCA) as the main technology partner in a massive effort to digitize public-domain books and other materials (that is, those not subject to copyright or no longer covered by copyright). The project—which will result in “a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions,” according to a statement from the consortium—will be based at a new facility at the Boston Public Library, built around automated book-scanning machines developed by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

Local library leaders greeted the announcement as a victory for taxpayers. “The Boston Library Consortium includes some pretty significant publicly funded institutions—the Boston Public Library, for instance, as well as the State Library of Massachusetts and the flagship state libraries of Connecticut and New Hampshire,” notes Ann Wolpert, director of libraries at MIT, which is part of the consortium. “These libraries, which are funded by taxpayers, really have a public purpose, and I think that for them, the argument of joining the OCA rather than going with one of the more commercial partners was simply a matter of being true to their funding base. Rather than put their work in a proprietary environment, searchable only by one search engine, [the consortium] felt strongly that it would be important to make sure that whatever they digitize should be available to taxpayers without constraint.” Libraries at the private colleges and universities belonging to the consortium, including MIT, Brandeis, Tufts, Brown, and Williams, “were happy to honor that point of view,” says Wolpert.

At stake for every library considering how to digitize its collections is the question of how to help readers find the material once it’s online. Google is credited by many members of the library community with kick-starting the entire digitization movement in 2004 with its massive Google Print project (now known as Google Book Search). But the same librarians have shied away from working with the search giant, largely due to the company’s requirement, mentioned by Wolpert, that books digitized via its factory-scale scanning effort be searchable exclusively through the Google search engine. Microsoft, which has its own book digization project, Live Search Books, imposes similar terms.

Yahoo and the Internet Archive, a non-profit created by software entrepreneur and Alexa founder Brewster Kahle, launched the OCA in 2005 as a non-commercial alternative to the Google project. The alliance’s goal is to build a permanent archive of digitized text and multimedia content from collections around the world, using open standards for the “metadata” such as author and title information that makes these materials more discoverable and searchable. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the OCA has already digitized more than 100,000 volumes from private, national, and university collections—including the personal library of John Adams, held by the Boston Public Library. The materials are indexed by the OCA members’ own search engines and by the Internet Archive.

“Going with OCA was a very concerted effort by the Consortium, and the primary reason is for the material to remain free and open,” says Barbara Preece, the consortium’s executive director. “People weren’t happy with the restrictions that Google and Microsoft put on—that you can only search from the single search engine. These groups are not interested in content. They are interested in search and advertising. And the fear is that this content would be restricted only to people who can afford to get it.”

One local institution conspicuously absent from the Boston Library Consortium and from the agreement with the OCA is the Harvard University Library, which, with its 15.8 million volumes, is the largest academic library in the world. Harvard was among the five institutions partnering with Google when it launched Google Print, and still has an agreement with Google to digitize the public-domain books in its collection.

But the same local library leaders who advocate the OCA’s non-commercial, non-exclusive approach to book digitization stop short of criticizing Harvard for sticking with Google. In fact, some welcome the presence of competing philosophies as libraries go through the digital transition. “It’s a very important time to have lots of experiments running, to test different notions of how to do industrial-scale digitizing,” says MIT’s Wolpert. “And so my point of view on this is the more the merrier, because we’ll learn from every one of these undertakings. Frankly, I think that Google gets enormous credit for having gotten the ball rolling.”

Library professionals in other regions are applauding the Boston consortium’s move. “Given the dispersal of print materials across the North American landscape, it’s good news anytime you get a cluster of institutions coming together” on open digitization efforts, says Nancy Elkington, director of partner relations at RLG Programs, the R&D wing of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a 40-year-old library cooperative that maintains the WorldCat global union catalog.

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