It was bound to happen.
Word from the London Book Fair is that Google is going into the book business. By year’s end they will launch two book related initiatives that will further alter the book landscape.
What’s in store:
A book rental program that will let you rent the content of a book on a weekly basis.
and
A book retail program that will allow users lifetime access to the texts they purchase.
They are not attaching the cursed e-book tag to either project.
Michael Cairnes, who was at the Google sessions at the London Book Fair, has the scoop in his blog post titled “Google Lending Books” which includes his follow up with Google on these initiatives.
This is the missing piece to the puzzle.
Their aggressive approach to libraries and their books begins to make sense. They are scanning books at warp speed, 30,000 a week just at the University of Michigan.
Google has become part of the DNA of information. It would seem a logical next step to corner the library market. They are homes to our written heritage, storehouses of knowledge and information. And Google needs information. The Google Monster is hungry.
Last month’s article by Eric Morath at the Detroit News on Google’s scanning of the University of Michigan’s 7 million volume library touched on this.
“In Google’s view, even the wide expanse of the Internet can’t compare to the amount of knowledge stored in books. So searching and retrieving results from written works is a natural outgrowth of Google’s root technology.
Forget all the fuss you hear like “Google’s altruistic motive for the project is to make the books available to those who may not have easy access to them.”
When you hear Allan Adler, the American Association of Publishers’ (AAP) vice president for legal and government affairs say “There’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s to Google’s financial benefit to do this” you can be sure that altruism as been thrown out the window. The AAP is the political action committee for the publishing world and mix that with Google’s billions of dollars and you have poisonous potential.
“Google argues that the limited amount of information it displays ultimately benefits holders of the copyright because it encourages searchers to seek out the book.” Those snippets and limited views that they throw at you now become teasers. You got to pay to play.
This is why I argue for public funds and not for profit companies to undertake the digitization of our cultural heritage. This is exactly why.
Has anyone heard the word author mentioned anywhere in all this? Copyright and publishers are everywhere.
In addition to adding another layer of complexity to the term bookseller, the meaning of out-of-print will soon change too. Out-of-print will no longer mean unavailable. It will mean unavailable in book form.
Until Google gets in the print on demand business.
Then what happens when they start buying the publishers?
This is serious stuff.
Links
Robert Townsend at the American Historical Association blog Google Books: What’s Not to Like
Jill E. Grog and Beth Ashmore’s article at Information Today Google Book Search Libraries and Their Digital Copies. Includes a list of what libraries are digitizing everything and which ones are only digitizing material in the public domain.
Past Book Patrol posts:
on the AAP and their “Caught Reading” campaign
The First Cracks in Google’s Attempt to Digitize the World