Quote:
Originally Posted by Juliette
I say go for it. It's a bit like Amazon's excerpts and "search inside" feature- I think it actually helped sell books. Publishers should be happy.
And I would be quite ok with a paying service too. Too many times we (me and friends) found ourself with a book we can't find at the library but just on google- and, of course, just a small part of it. Plus it would be a pdf or a proper ebook- don't care, as long as we're able to put our eyes on the text  |
Mainstream publishers *were* happy with the settlement.
The problem was:
Academic publishers & authors, who would like (1) the ability to share content without charging, (2) some guarantee of good scans & accurate metadata, (3) lots more annotation sharing ability, (4) some guarantee that the prices won't spike as soon as libraries have come to count on the archives, (5) consideration for the privacy of the library users,
Music publishers, who didn't all agree with the given price, and most especially weren't going for "you must submit to us a list of every individual copyrighted work you want excepted." EMI, with millions of copyrights under its control, is not submitting to Google a list of every set of album notes & CD insert it produced before 2009,
Comic book publishers, for whom "in print" and "out of print" are transient states, and don't want to deal with material showing up on Googlebooks for free, just before they release their"Best of Captain Stupendous from 1973-78" collection,
Non-publishers, like students who've written theses and published a dozen copies, or activists who've published chapbooks of anti-government rhetoric that they might be threatened about by angry neighbors, or small religious groups who've published prayers and songs of their faith, which again, can call down the wrath of neighbors, depending on the religion,
(I'm unsure how many of these are at risk; many weren't registered with the copyright office. But google's methods for establishing that are fairly opaque and complex, and not at all reassuring.)
Fanzine authors, who don't want their legal names publicly attached to the weird hobby they participated in during the early 80's,
Non-US publishers, who don't want the books that are in-print in their country available for free on Google because they're out of print in the US,
various other groups.
Mainstream publishers were ecstatic with the Googlebooks agreement; it's everyone else whose needs & wants got ignored. There's no privacy consideration for the authors who deliberately published in small venues originally, no ability for any other group to make the same or a similar arrangement, no ability for an author to insist, "my book is a CC by-nc-sa work; it is distributable
for free or not at all."
I LOVE what Google was trying to do. They just overstepped a few too many lines. I hope they work out something similar for mainstream authors, manage to avoid the monopoly (not sure how they can do that, actually), and edit their terms to take into consideration what other kinds of rightsholders need.