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Publishers Protest Google Library Project
gollum123 writes "A group of academic publishers is challenging Google Inc.'s plan to scan millions of library books into its Internet search engine index, highlighting fears that the ambitious project will violate copyrights and stifle future sales. In a letter scheduled to be delivered to Google Monday, the Association of American University Presses described the online search engine's library project as a troubling financial threat to its membership -- 125 nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books. The university presses depend on books sales and other licensing agreements for most of their revenue, making copyright protections essential to their survival."
Remember, that libraries generally have one copy of a book (sometimes more, but rare) and that a person is borrowing it. So if you read a book at the library and wanted to have your own - you had to buy it. By having all of these publications online, people will have a digital copy of them for free. This *will* hinder book sales. While some people might want the nice hardbound copy - most people will just settle for the digital copy which is just as good.
FOr example, in my life, there are very few books that I have read in digital format that I have bought to have as a hard copy.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Honestly, this can be a great financial gain for those publishers, if they get together with Google on how to best select enticing pieces of their copyrighted works in order to drive sales, the academic community will have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"It's Google Inc. now eh?
I'm not sure why you're modded as funny, but I feel that you're misinformed. They have been Google, Inc..
Non-profit does not mean that they don't make money. It just means that whatever money they make goes into paying salaries and stuff and not to expansion.
I believe they are indexing the books. So that if your searching for some information google can tell you to look in page 9 of book so and so. Obviously the entire book will be in googles database, but not nessesary accessable to the enduser. Either way I don't get all the fluff about why they are up in arms and want google to stop.
Wait to see if google really is violating your copyright. If they are sue them.
I'd be willing to place a large bet that google is not going to break copyright, they arn't stupid.
You are not keeping what you get at the library. However, you are keeping this digital copy. Two different scenarios.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
To quote from an article in Chronicle of Higher Education, reprinted in Prime Palaver #10, Michael Jensen (their director of publishing technologies) said:
// TODO: fix sig
I think you're looking for "In the Net of Dreams"
by William Mark Simmons.
There should indeed be choice by the author. These academic publications generally prohibit the author from making any other choice than assigning copyright to them, effectively tying the spread of knowledge to the financial interests of the publication.
non-profit means that all profits go right back into the business. they can, in fact must, expand their business. The non-profit part means that their are no owners or CEO's that get more money if the business makes more money. All the money goes back into the services that the company provides. if non-profits weren't allowed to expand, then OSDL's recent announcement that they are going to expand operations in Europe and Asia would be a violation of the law.
my pet machine
Massively. The last Harry Potter book was scanned and made into a readable ebook within 24 hours of its release, and made available on the internet. Many of my friends just use their PDAs and ebook software to read books with, I dont think any of them has actually touched a physical book in a couple of years.
(I suspect that they are up to about 100 years.)
Correct, copyrights last 95 years currently (regardless of whether the original author still lives or not).
From "about Google Print"
Granted it works slightly different than the grandparent's post regarding how fiction spreads but it has the same net effect -- more sales for journals (or books) that are really good and useful (or great entertainment).
I do have some real insight into this, I served on the Dean of Libraries student advistory committee one year while I was in college. Doing so was quite enlightening, and you'd be surprised how much a small committee of students like that can get changed if the Dean of Libraries is really listening (which ours was, and in my experience most librarians listen to complaints/suggestions/etc. quite well as they feel their job is to provide the information needed by others.)
My advisors said something like that many times. And ``must'' meant ``MUST''. I eventually subscribed to JEL, AER and JEP (the three American Economics Association rags), in part because of this.
I doubt it.
Believe it.
Personally, I've never heard of word of mouth (based on content) resulting in an institutional subscription.
That's the only way institutional subscriptions happen: some professor decides that he needs some journal to stay current in his field, so he recommends it to the librarian and lobbies his collegues to do the same. That process starts when he hears (either from a collegue or through some service like Citeseer or google) about some important content in that journal.
See what I've been reading.
"Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?"
Baen free library has some pretty solid numbers to substantiate that. They've seen clear increases in the sales of books which are available for free (both compared to similar books which aren't available online, and compared to the sales of that same book before online distribution)
Unfortunately, University Presses (and publishers of academic journals in general) stand to make HUGE profits because of the stranglehold they have on the market, however narrowly focused a market it is. University libraries are forced to continue subscribing to journals in order to stay respectable, even as those subscriptions climb upwards of ten or even one hundred thousand annually. The people who actually use the journals, mostly faculty, never see the cost. (Incidentally, prestigious journals do not pay their contributors, because being published in Nature or something of its ilk is enough of an honor)
While it is possible to request an article from another university, inter-university requests for a given journal are usually limited to five per year, on the assumption that if a university has that much demand for it, they need their own subscription.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina.
In ever peer-reviewed journal I've ever published in, page charges are always optional. Along with the copyright form that gives the journal permission to reproduce the author's work, the page charge form allows the author to decline -- no questions asked -- the page charge fee.
Find free books.
Indeed. And that, as I've pointed out here before amid cries of trolling, does make legal justification for other Google features -- Google Cache in particular, but also Google Groups and potentially things like Google Image Search -- uncertain at best.
Years ago DejaNews, the predecessor to Google Groups, tried inserting advertizing links into Usenet postings -- e.g., if you mentioned a book, DejaNews would turn the title into a link to Amazon. This peed more than a few Usenetters' Wheaties -- DN was altering other people's content without permission, and making money from the derivative without paying the content providers.
Now that's copyright infringement. And a sort I think most Slashdotters would take offense at.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of