Friday, August 12, 2005
Google has been scanning library books, OCRing and indexing their content, and making them searchable on the web. This very useful service is at print.google.com. Sadly, they've suspended it for now.
Publishers have been complaining about their mounting woes for years. University presses have been cutting back their catalogues as their parent institutions push them to become profitable, or at least loose less money. Flipping through the university press catalogs it's not difficult to see why they lose money, as it's hard to imagine the audiences for many of the books published. Most books are either too specialized or too expensive to sell more than a few copies. Especially when one hears that libraries are spending more on providing internet access than on purchasing books for their collections. With publishers having to guess the potential markets for each book, over-estimating, and ending up with warehouses full of unsellable books it all seems like an archaic way to go about things. I expect academic publishing may return to subscription publishing (only doing a print run when enough buyers have asked for a specific book) or embrace printing on demand.
The Google service is wonderful, allowing one to search libraries full of books just like one can search the internet. Despite the publishers' fears I suspect that potential buyers will discover more books pertinent to their interests through online indexes than they ever could by searching card catalogs or shelves, and then only if they had physical access to a library.
But beyond publishers' fears of lost sales, I wonder what Google's service will mean for authors that want specific retrictions placed on their texts. For example, Heidegger did not want his books published with indexes. He wanted his readers to read entire texts, and not simply look-up and read the bits containing specific indexed words. Yet today many of his works are indexed by Google. I like it because even if I've read a text, many times I want to find a passage, and a full-text search is usually much faster than thumbing through the book. And it's not like Heidegger texts don't include excerpts from earlier philosophers themselves. Still I wonder if the Heidegger estate has a case to make. Beyond the fair-use argument between Google and the publishers, should authors' wishes or stipulations regarding the indexing of their works be respected? ¶ 9:51 PM
[A] trade group representing publishers said Friday the action falls far short in stopping what it sees as massive copyright violations on the part of the search-engine giant.I was wondering when publishers would complain.
...
[Google] says it has the legal right to go into a public library and copy books, as long as it doesn't make copyrighted material available online. With copyrighted works, the company only makes bibliographic information and a few short sentences of text around each search term available, unless it has permission to show more.
Publishers have been complaining about their mounting woes for years. University presses have been cutting back their catalogues as their parent institutions push them to become profitable, or at least loose less money. Flipping through the university press catalogs it's not difficult to see why they lose money, as it's hard to imagine the audiences for many of the books published. Most books are either too specialized or too expensive to sell more than a few copies. Especially when one hears that libraries are spending more on providing internet access than on purchasing books for their collections. With publishers having to guess the potential markets for each book, over-estimating, and ending up with warehouses full of unsellable books it all seems like an archaic way to go about things. I expect academic publishing may return to subscription publishing (only doing a print run when enough buyers have asked for a specific book) or embrace printing on demand.
The Google service is wonderful, allowing one to search libraries full of books just like one can search the internet. Despite the publishers' fears I suspect that potential buyers will discover more books pertinent to their interests through online indexes than they ever could by searching card catalogs or shelves, and then only if they had physical access to a library.
But beyond publishers' fears of lost sales, I wonder what Google's service will mean for authors that want specific retrictions placed on their texts. For example, Heidegger did not want his books published with indexes. He wanted his readers to read entire texts, and not simply look-up and read the bits containing specific indexed words. Yet today many of his works are indexed by Google. I like it because even if I've read a text, many times I want to find a passage, and a full-text search is usually much faster than thumbing through the book. And it's not like Heidegger texts don't include excerpts from earlier philosophers themselves. Still I wonder if the Heidegger estate has a case to make. Beyond the fair-use argument between Google and the publishers, should authors' wishes or stipulations regarding the indexing of their works be respected? ¶ 9:51 PM
