Google's Digital Library on hold
Coolmac
Date:
16/08/2005
It seems that Google Print has had to halt the scanning in of books in the US now due to opposition from publishers and other copyright holders.
Now I hadn't used Google Print at all until today, and I first heard of
this in an article with a lot of quotes from the pro-copyright crowd.
Now being pro copyright isn't bad, but reading the quotes from these
people you got the feeling that all I had to do was search for the
book, and then print it out (or just read it all on the PC). Now that
would be bad, copyright holders would lose many rights; their books
would be available in their entirety to anyone who looked.
Anyway,
always one to question the truth behind these things, I loaded up
Google Print and did a search. A book still under copyright showed up
in the results and I proceeded to violate the copyright holder's rights
by clicking on the result. Oh yes, I am going to download entire books,
mail them to my friends, put them on p2p networks and bring the
publishing world to its knees. What? I can only see a few pages (index
and copyright notice being two of them), so there go my plans of world
domination. With those few pages I can pretty much decide if I want the
book or not, and if I was looking for a very small amount of
information, it may have given me all I need. So what it does is help
the user decide if the book is worth purchasing, kind of like if I was
in a book store flipping through the pages of a book before I decided
whether to buy it or not. Hell they have the "buy this book" links
right on the same page; you're literally a few clicks away from
ordering it (thus giving the copyright holder some money).
To
give the scared copyright holders some credit, the system has been
hacked a few times so that people could get the whole texts of books.
But Google has fixed these, and when you think about this, it isn't
much different from someone taking a book out of the library and
photocopying it. It requires a conscious effort on the part of the
user, and I highly doubt this kind of person would have bought the book
anyway; they would probably just go to the local library, take out the
book, and photocopy it.
Copyright holders of all mediums
seem utterly afraid of the internet and its ability to help users get
information for free. But stopping the internet look to be close on
impossible. Many books get scanned in and put up on P2P networks
already. If anything getting a huge name like Google to do something
similar, yet respect copyright in spirit (if not necessarily quite to
the letter of the law), is a great idea that will only help the
copyright holders make some money.Maybe I'm just naïve, but to me it
looks like Google Print would be doing more good and harm to copyright
holders, and I am sure that the self publishing author will receive
immense benefit from this...
Then again, maybe that's
why publishers hate this idea so much. With the user able to search for
book by content, and not by what has been advertised and pushed into
book stores the most, won't publishers be losing a bit of their
advantage over the self published? Okay so I'm overly paranoid, but as
the great Hunter S. Thompson said: "Just because you're paranoid
doesn't mean they're not out to get you." Or something like that.
