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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."
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?
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.
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.
The digital "copy" offered by Google is certainly not "just as good" as a real copy. It is better in one way and worse in several others. First, it is better because you can find passages by searching. If I type "hemoglobin rupture" I can find a number of specific references. It is worse in that reading on a screen sucks, it hurts your eyes after a time and ties you to a screen and electricity. More importantly, Google is not allowing anyone to read a whole book, only a small passage from the book. In a few very specific cases (like a dictionary, or reference with very short entries) this might be as good, but for the most part it is not. Google has taken great care to limit this and design the service to help you find the name of the book you need, not to let you read it for free.
There are three real reasons scholarly publishers are against this. First dictionaries and references with very short passages are made obsolete (as I mentioned above). Second, many modern scholars do not really want to read a work, merely cite it to back up some point and these people would be better served by just using Google's service. Finally, it allows a researcher to read a short, relevant passage from a book which is often enough to know that a book is useless and prevent someone from buying a work that sounds useful, but is not.
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.
You seem to be under the impression that Google is just offering up books for free in digital format. That is not my understanding of the service at all.
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
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.)
"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)