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  3. A library to Last Forever "The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are the

A library to Last Forever "The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are the

admin2013-06-17  41
问题                    A library to Last Forever
    "The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are the failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; the failure of ’power companies’ to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. "
    This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles. But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written thousands of electric cars were produced and that year was nearly a century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journal Electrical World, which I found in Google Books, our searchable repository of millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable lessons for the future.  In this case, I was lucky—electric vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose. Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.
    But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most persistent researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.
    Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to decay slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon—a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
    Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that they digitize all books a decade ago, when they were a fledgling(无经验的) startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that they were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.
    The next year Google Books were sued (起诉) by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While they have had disagreements, they have a common goal—to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, they were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes the shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.
    There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
    Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory(强制的) license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them a motivator to step forward.
    Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement prevents any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns(独角兽). Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice—fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
    If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions.
    Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of the products, they are working hard to address them--improving bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy. And if they don’t get their product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.
    In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books. I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact(未触动的) in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.
What happened to books written after 1923?
选项 A、They are handed down generation after generation.
B、People can buy them with large amount of money.
C、They are preserved in libraries and bookstores.
D、Most of them are lost year by year.
答案D
解析 根据题干关键词books written after 1923定位到第三段第二句：Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. 句中black hole用了比喻的手法，下文具体解释black hole的含义：书籍会逐渐腐烂、丢失，剩下的几册也在火灾、水灾等灾害中损毁。D项符合文意。
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大学英语四级

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