Tim O'Reilly on the Google Library Project

dkleinsc writes "The New York Times is running an op-ed piece(free registration required) by Tim O'Reilly arguing that the Google Library Project is a good thing for authors in general, and suggests a lawsuit by the Author's Guild against Google is acting against authors' best interest."

Comments

Re:This produces and interesting situation...

[doublem]

What would seem to make more sense is for Google to only scan this 20 percent of the text that they will use and not the full text

I was under the impression that the 20% would be determined by what portion of a book most frequently matched a given search criteria.

Alternately, they may be saying that only 20% will made available to a given IP address. If that's the case, then creative use of a few proxy servers can get you the whole book.

Of course, most books worth pirating have already been scanned and OCRed, and can be found in various file sharing networks already. The fact that the Author's Guild is going after Google for this only makes sense when you realize they want Google to pay them a licensing fee to offer this service.

Yep, they want Google top pay THEM for offering a Service that will make THEIR writers more money.