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Originally Posted by barryem
That's a really interesting situation and a fascinating conflict. The publishers were right in thinking that Googles project could eventually lead to business disaster. Not overnight but if the books became available like that publishers and booksellers would lose a lot of sales and over time a lot more till they eventually became almost irrelevant.
On the other hand it just might have been one of the major cultural milestones in history. I remember reading an article, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, listing the events that changed civilization most. These included, according to that article, agriculture, which lead to cities and government, the discovery that the universe didn't revolve around the Earth, pointing out how unimportant we are, Freud's discovery of the subconscious and the invention of the atom bomb, which told us we could come to an end at any time. I suspect that the internet probably belongs on that list as well but that article was too long ago for that to be considered.
The Google project, in a similar article written a few hundred years in the future, might be on that list and even top it if it had been allowed to proceed. And yet the things that brought it down were very real. That just might be a tragic flaw in capitalism.
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No doubt Capitalism played the major role in this but you cannot overlook possible underlying supporting cultural factors. Americans are anti-intellectual and anti-intellectual video culture has overtaken print culture since at least the advent of the T.V. That is the reason eReaders are a dwindling niche market (Kobo Aura One and the Oasis are good side affects of this trend , though, for us literati we get better ereaders but less choice). I bet more people have iPads and other tablets than eReaders and that is not because Tablets are equally good at reading but because most people want the tablets for other more anti-intellectual features while reading books is more of a less important afterthought function to them.
Now don't get me wrong I am not attacking Americans here. I am American, from New York, but America is anti-intellectual like the Roman empire rather than intellectual like the ancient Greeks. This is undeniable, for instance, see books like : The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby and Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter etc...
You know what ? Librarians, scholars and other people trying to keep their position in the capitalist system in relation to books or the gate keepers of knowledge may have been over ruled by Google if they bribed the court or politicians or whatnot to have the court rule on their side. Why did not capitalism function in this desired way ? As Steve Jobs said Amazon's Kindle e-book reader will fail because Americans simply don't read. So Google had no financial incentive here. So, uh , yeah, if the eReader market dwindles down and Kobo and Amazon eventually stop making eReaders all together who is to blame ? Americans. We are our own enemy.