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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Part of me has to wonder... Right now Google has agreed to set aside funds to compensate authors for their works; of course most authors never make more than a small percentage of what the book actually makes through sales; agents, editors, printers, distributors and book stores all take sizable chunks of the money earned; all them profit from the author's initial efforts. I wonder if ultimately most authors might not do better publishing with Google Books initially (if Google ever opens up to such a concept); they might make more in the long run.
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I think Google's settlement is potentially advantageous for many authors. My concerns include--
Problems with their approach to academic authors & works (i.e. no different from popular novels: no mass sharing of annotations, no allowance for authors making their books freely available, no open use for research, no guarantees about scan & metadata quality),
No checks against future price-gouging: how can libraries confirm that Google won't triple their prices after they've been around long enough to start purging paper books because they've got access to ebooks?
Direct profiting from orphan works, instead of setting aside that money for the authors or for continuation of the project & lowering prices in other areas,
Insufficient opt-out abilities, on several levels,
Lack of coherent definitions of many of their terms (Is "best of Batman" a book, or periodical? Periodicals are exempt; books can be scanned), and problems with publishers that regularly move books in & out of print, like comic book companies.
I like Google's goals; I think their implementation is troublesome in a few too many areas to be allowed to work. I think the Author's Guild reps made a deal that works fine for them, and most of the authors affiliated with them, but does not work for anything resembling all rightsholders of registered "books" (as blurrily defined by Google) in the US.
EMI's objections pointed out that they own or control millions of copyrights, and are certainly not going to list every single one of them to opt out from Google's arrangement. (Every lyric booklet sold with a CD; every "songs of [topic]" book; every songbook with music that falls below Google's percentage for exemption.) Other types of authors have pointed out flaws in other areas, all of which boil down to "Google & the author's guild paid attention to the concerns of popular mainstream authors & publishers, and ignored everyone else."