Author's Temporarily Confuse Themselves With Recording Industry, File Lawsuits
The Author's Guild filed a lawsuit against Google Print, a searchable online archive of books.
"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild
Even if this point is true, we have to wonder, is the President of the Guild really so stupid as to think Google print is a bad thing?
Let's review just exactly what google print is.
According to the C-net article reporting on the lawsuit, Google Print is "working to scan all or parts of the book collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. It intends to make those texts searchable on Google and to sell advertisements on the Web pages."
It might seem from this brief summary of the project, that in fact, writers and authors and book publishers should be very frightened of the project. It would seem that Google is in fact trying to take the hard work of these writers and make money from the books in collections of a few select libraries. But hold on just a second. Has anyone from the Guild or C-Net or anywhere actually used the service?
Let's say for a moment, you are like us, and are really turned on by a good discussion of suburban sprawl. Let's say you want to use Google Print to find out more information, so that, if you come across some one else who wants to talk about sprawl, you can.
Search Google Print for "Suburban Sprawl" and you get a list of books.
Wow! you think, looking over the list hoping to find the time to digest the entirely list before your next session of Suburban Sprawl Addicts Anonymous. You click on the first book. Suddenly you are looking at the table of contents, and you think, "this is a great book, I'm going to read the whole thing"
The trouble is, the whole thing isn't available for you to read. In fact, many of the titles only have the table of contents available to look at. What Google Print does provide is a number of places where you can buy the book-- Barnes and Noble, Amazon, the publisher, and others. In fact, if you want to read anything more than the table of contents in some cases, you need to buy the book.
Of course, there are some cases where you can look at text from the actually book, not just the table of contents. What does google do after you click through a few pages? Google blocks the rest of the book. Again, you are encouraged to buy the whole thing.
In both cases, the user does not have access to the whole book. The user has no more access than they might reasonably have at a bookstore or a library after casually flipping through a few pages of the book. Even in the case where a few pages of the text are visible, the true contents of the book are kept safely sealed away in the google archives.
What might this remind you of? Amazon.com started a system of scanning its books in for searching a year ago, although, with permission of publishers. In essence, Google print is no different than Amazon, except Amazon is working with publishers and Google is working with libraries.
Google print will actually produce greater book sales for authors. Authors from small presses like those attached to universities and without the mass market appeal will find a whole knew audience. Even better, the readers who come across their book will actually read the book because they have an interest in the book-- thus they searched for a keyword.
Sure in some cases, people might read the table of contents and decide a particular book is not for them. But those people are not avoiding purchasing the book because Google Print "infringed" on the copyright of the author. Those people are instead not buying the book because it is not what they were looking for.
Google Print will be a fabulous service that will help connect authors with readers. It will help organize information in age when there is already too much and not enough ways of tracking it. The author's Guild is moronic to think Google Print will do anything but help them.
Put another way, the Author's Guild suit is akin to me suing Google for indexing this blog so that when people use google's search feature, they access the site. If an author doesn't want his book read, he or she never should have published it to begin with.
"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild
Even if this point is true, we have to wonder, is the President of the Guild really so stupid as to think Google print is a bad thing?
Let's review just exactly what google print is.
According to the C-net article reporting on the lawsuit, Google Print is "working to scan all or parts of the book collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. It intends to make those texts searchable on Google and to sell advertisements on the Web pages."
It might seem from this brief summary of the project, that in fact, writers and authors and book publishers should be very frightened of the project. It would seem that Google is in fact trying to take the hard work of these writers and make money from the books in collections of a few select libraries. But hold on just a second. Has anyone from the Guild or C-Net or anywhere actually used the service?
Let's say for a moment, you are like us, and are really turned on by a good discussion of suburban sprawl. Let's say you want to use Google Print to find out more information, so that, if you come across some one else who wants to talk about sprawl, you can.
Search Google Print for "Suburban Sprawl" and you get a list of books.
Wow! you think, looking over the list hoping to find the time to digest the entirely list before your next session of Suburban Sprawl Addicts Anonymous. You click on the first book. Suddenly you are looking at the table of contents, and you think, "this is a great book, I'm going to read the whole thing"
The trouble is, the whole thing isn't available for you to read. In fact, many of the titles only have the table of contents available to look at. What Google Print does provide is a number of places where you can buy the book-- Barnes and Noble, Amazon, the publisher, and others. In fact, if you want to read anything more than the table of contents in some cases, you need to buy the book.
Of course, there are some cases where you can look at text from the actually book, not just the table of contents. What does google do after you click through a few pages? Google blocks the rest of the book. Again, you are encouraged to buy the whole thing.
In both cases, the user does not have access to the whole book. The user has no more access than they might reasonably have at a bookstore or a library after casually flipping through a few pages of the book. Even in the case where a few pages of the text are visible, the true contents of the book are kept safely sealed away in the google archives.
What might this remind you of? Amazon.com started a system of scanning its books in for searching a year ago, although, with permission of publishers. In essence, Google print is no different than Amazon, except Amazon is working with publishers and Google is working with libraries.
Google print will actually produce greater book sales for authors. Authors from small presses like those attached to universities and without the mass market appeal will find a whole knew audience. Even better, the readers who come across their book will actually read the book because they have an interest in the book-- thus they searched for a keyword.
Sure in some cases, people might read the table of contents and decide a particular book is not for them. But those people are not avoiding purchasing the book because Google Print "infringed" on the copyright of the author. Those people are instead not buying the book because it is not what they were looking for.
Google Print will be a fabulous service that will help connect authors with readers. It will help organize information in age when there is already too much and not enough ways of tracking it. The author's Guild is moronic to think Google Print will do anything but help them.
Put another way, the Author's Guild suit is akin to me suing Google for indexing this blog so that when people use google's search feature, they access the site. If an author doesn't want his book read, he or she never should have published it to begin with.
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