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Recently, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Google launched a website ded¬icated to literacy combining its books, video, mapping and blogging services together to help teachers and educational organisations share reading resources.
“Google’s business was born out of a desire to help people find information,” Mr. Nikesh Arora, vice-president of Google’s European operations was quoted as saying. The service is being projected as something that combines a rich set of re¬sources ostensibly to help global lit¬eracy. Critics note that it also, help the educational credentials of the IT giant. Google is perhaps the fastest growing company of this scale, given the fact that it reached this stage in a mere eight years after it’s inception.
While Google says it’s “new site will serve as abridge to even grea¬ter communication and ac¬cess to important information about literacy problems and solutions” others think of the legal wrangles it found itself when it launched its “Google Print” to digitally scan all printed text books and make them freely available online.
Everyone, especially the publishers and authors are not amused. Well, there are a few publishers who embraced the Google’s initiative but many other publishers and authors believe that it is a direct and brazen violation of copyright laws and sued it.
A law suit was immediately filed by the Authors Guild, against the book scanning project. Other groups, like the Association of American University Presses also joined the criticism.
The Association of American Publishers has filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging the Internet Search behemoth's plans to digitally scan and distribute the texts of major library collections would violate copyright laws. Prior to filing this lawsuit the group had lengthy discussions with Google's management about the company's plans which were eventually broke down. Whole or part of the library collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University were initially planned. While it allows people to search the texts, it wants to add advertisements related to such searches! Naturally, passions ran fast and people accused Google of “seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers.”
As per the UNESCO (United Na¬tions Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisafion) estimates more than a billion people around the world over the age of 15 are illiterate and Google’s new project is ostensibly projected as of help to curb illiteracy. We know Google Video is fast catching up on the famous ‘You Tube’ website for freelancing videos. Now, Google is adding many novel projects based on this service to Google Literacy. Actually, Google has requested literacy groups around the world to upload video segments ex¬plaining and demonstrating their successful teaching pro¬grammes - as an inspiration for others and to emulate elsewhere.A same-language subtitle pro¬ject from India that uses Bol¬lywood (Indian Hindi film industry) films to teach reading and a video tutorial made by a group of six-to-nine ¬year old children with the help of S26NYC (A New York based non-profit organisation) are a few to mention from the first few hundred to be posted.
The project can be accessed at google.com/literacy and google.de/litera¬cy. Google maintains that students see the web as something they can contribute to not just to browse through and they would be inspired to think big, to write and film more. They reinforce their claims on the new service by using Goo¬gle’s mapping technology to help literacy organisations of world find each other, communicate and share educational resources. One can only wait and the developments about which way Google Print and Google Literacy projects are heading for.
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