Rich, Motoko. “Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little seen Books,” New York Times January 4, 2009. <
Citing a January NYTimes article, Barbara Quint discusses the latest compromise within the Google book case. Here Google has made an agreement with several publishing houses about making available to the public books that are in copyright but out of print for a cost of $5.99 a piece. This price, a bit less than the $9.99 of Amazon Kindle and without the need to buy a Kindle, would make this a very convenient and inexpensive way to read.
There was also discussion of an institutional license for libraries. Quint points out that such a resource would quickly become a major reference tool among all libraries, expanding the ability of libraries around the country to provide access to a trove of research materials once available only at the largest research institutions. There is something incredibly intriguing and exciting about the access of all those books on line to so many libraries around the nation, around the world.
It makes the scholar in me salivate.
Of course, the caveat is that this will be available if institutional rates do not go too high, which Quint points out is not Google’s general way of operating. It is an if, however, that worries me. As marvelous as the prospects are on the one hand, they are quite disturbing that one organization should have control of this much information. I know that I am generally distrustful, but I keep thinking about slavery here. A slave might have a very nice master and be well-treated, but masters die, sell their belongings, move on to other projects. So corporations today. It may be that Google is a nice corporation, that it wants the best for society. But Ben and Jerry sold their ice cream brand. Borders was sold to K-mart. The people who begin a corporation and create its original corporate ethos rarely hold on forever. They too want to make money enough out the enterprise to sell it and retire.
As far as the licensing itself, what would it look like? Quint suggests that probably a license would create a single designated computer in a library to access these materials. Does this mean that people will not be able to access this material from their homes? I also wonder about the copying factor. Will we be able to email ourselves a text and if we buy it may we print it out? Save to a hard drive forever? Download it and copy it?
With Kindle it is a bit less complicated because of the machine itself. In contast, Google books makes the material available on any pc, perhaps other networked hand held devices such as phones or blackberries or iphones, etc. These may not yet be comfortable book reading devices, but there is no reason why they could not begin to incorporate some of the ease of use that is part of the KINDLE. Indeed, it would be probably foolish to believe that they won’t.
In The NY Times essay, author Rich posits that this settlement to the Google dispute is not a bell weather for writers, individually who will probably not make lots of money off of this deal. But Rich argues that it is a cultural victory that will increase exposure and access in ways heretofore unimaginable. Rich also suggests that revenues may actually be fairly substantial for publishing houses.
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