Apparently there a lot of orphaned books out there. These poor little documents have no mothers or fathers or other living relatives. They reside in research facilities and libraries. But fear not little books– Google wants you.
Google has cut a deal with an association of publishers and an association of authors: we will take all those books. Thanks. Goodbye.
Google wants to scan in all these books. I don’t think they plan to sell access to them directly– they will profit by having you end up at their websites whenever you do an online search for any text in any of these books.
This is not all bad. In fact, this could be wonderfully useful. What has some people upset is that Google, in order to protect their investment, is demanding exclusive rights to this material. And they must have paid some money to the people in charge at the publishers and authors associations– people in charge– for these rights. Will any individual publishers and authors ever benefit? Almost certainly not as much as the people who negotiated the deal will benefit. This is the same principle behind the government giving away oil and gas and water: we citizens get nothing. They get lavish campaign contributions and parties.
Google would probably argue that if they don’t get exclusive rights, it won’t be in their interests to scan all these books in, so they won’t do it, and nobody else will either.
You also have to understand that this agreement is not the same as legislation. Google has simply paid off the only groups likely to be able to muster a legal battle against them. If you were to start scanning in all these books yourself and then offer them online on your own web page, Google would likely resort to the standard corporate practice of threatening you with their lawyers with no intention of ever actually allowing the case to go to court.
The article in the New York Times.
Need some therapy? Apparently those librarians do. They are angry about this deal. They think it stinks. And they are “mad”, “angry”, “upset”.
A good therapist could provide an effective solution to this problem: they just need to get some therapy. They aren’t “angry”– they have “anger issues” that need to be addressed.