> The largest truly open library in human history
“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.
Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely.
Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled.
So blame publishers, not Google.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
It’s preposterous, and offensive to anyone’s intelligence to claim that this is about incentivizing production; does anyone seriously believe there is a potential artist out there who would avoid making their magnum opus if it could only be under copyright for 119 years?
This post which was on the front page today is relevant: https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-01-25-slop.html
This isn't like web search where web pages are publicly available and so Google can return search results across whatever it wants. For books, it relies on publisher cooperation to both supply book contents for indexing under license and give permissions for preview. If publishers say to turn off search, Google turns off search.
"The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will become harder and harder to find with time, so clip your own copies of everything you like to quote."
Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content.
Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.
William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible into English, which would have been an act to make information open and accessible.
That's not what he was put to death for. See https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/tyndales-her... and https://www.chinakasreflections.com/did-the-roman-catholic-c...
Your comment reflects the old “information wants to be free” ideals that used to dominate places like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit. But since LLMs arrived, a lot of the loudest voices here argue the opposite position when it comes to training data.
I’ve been trying to understand whether people have actually changed their views, or whether it’s mostly a shift in who is speaking up now.
But as a pirate, I specialize in finding hidden, hard to find, or otherwise lost sources. They're not making anybody any money, and I absolutely do not sell anything thats not mine (freely given).
But having every commercial work available for ingestion into an LLM is an amazing way to train an AI. However if you're going to use piracy at scale to train, you should also not be able to sell the LLM or access to it.
And yeah, that wrecks every corporate LLM strategy. Boo fucking hoo.
Do creators need paid for content they create? Ideally, yes! Do they deserve iron-fisted control of your hardware (DRM) to enact their demands? Fuck no!
Ideally, the LLMs would be FLOSS, full weights published, lists of content used to reproduce, etc. We could prune bad content and add more good. But the problem again is whoever does this must violate copyright cause copyright in the way its implemented is terrible.
In reality, I like the RIAA's congressional solution. You send a check for how many plays you did to BMI/ASCAP and you're good. That could be extended to books and shows. If that were done, you could have a New-Flix service that literally has every show and movie in existence. You just pay a reasonable cost per month to access the whole of video humanity.
Alas. Guess I'll have to build it myself.
maybe a short copyright would be fine (10 year fixed?) but copyright as-is seems indefensible to me
The original reason for copyright, patents, and trademarks made sense.
We want people to create and share. And unlike the old guild solutions from Europe, copyright and patents were a tradeoff to encourage the arts and science.
But what's a good tradeoff? Thats a big copyright question. 17 years? 34 years? Life of author? 75 years? How about individual non-commercial use? Or abandoned works?
And patents aren't even in scope, but we see similar abuses against the raison d'etra of them. Patents were supposed to entail a full reproduction of invention. Now, its a game of how incomplete can we make the filing while still getting protection. Or worse yet, really dumb shit has been patented like 1 click or the XOR patent, or that asshole Chakrabarty who patented living organisms.
There were good reasons for a fair copyright and patent law for furtherance of the art and sciences. That narrative was lost long ago. Now, only the violators can really push ahead. And they can't talk about it.
(Trademark law has never really had much complaints, aside trademarking a color. If you buy from XYZ company, you want to buy from them, not a counterfeit. And it relates back to coats of arms, again, representing a family or a charge.)
(a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all references of your search in that book.
(b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.
More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust
Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?
Then it would have been hella useful.
If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.
That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them), and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book beyond the standard preview pages.
But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and built up their collections...
"Hey, remove search?"
"OK, it was costing money anyways."
Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.
Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions.
But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements.
("At least nominally" because it may happen that a publisher puts out different editions regularly simply because by doing so they can get people to keep buying them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of book B then students may feel that they have to get that specific edition, and the university may feel that they have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's just different for the sake of being different then that may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.)
Most books with multiple editions are books that have been translated multiple times. It is definitely true that later translations aren't systematically better than earlier ones.
"But a few days ago they removed ALL search functions for any books with previews, which are disproportionately modern books." <emphasis mine>
Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to make copyright once again a net benefit for society.
Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview search was switched off by accident.
For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at archive.org.
I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books - it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.
Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.
