Google Print
Google has a new service out called Google Print. Well apparently, Google is being sued over it for copyright infringement. After reading a letter Kottke posted on his site, I’m going to have to agree with the writer and most of the people on the internet.
When you go to the library to take out a book, you are reading it for free. When you go to Amazon.com and look inside the book, you are reading it for free. When you go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, or any other book store, and read the book, you are reading it for free. If the book is interesting enough, you will purchase the book. Google Print is simply saving us the trip to the book store by allowing us to read the book online, and if we like it, buy the book online. My last trip to Borders resulted in me going back home and buying a book I read there at Amazon.Com. To take it one step further, the author who wrote Kottke asked her publisher to put her book on Google Print so people would read it.
In my experience, people like to know what they are buying before they buy it. And if anyone is like me, they like to display the books they read. It makes me feel smarter, and it impresses people. If I have the chance to read a book before I buy it, and I like it enough, I will most definitely buy the book. Later.
Maybe you don’t know it, but most bookstores (those without a giant corporation behind it) don’t, indeed can’t afford to, allow you to read the entire book in the store. The profits of the big guys are so gigantic that they can afford to write off the shopworn, coffe-stained and otherwise unsaleable books as an expense of doing business; independents and specialists cannot.
And the publishers and writers are suing Google because it has taken the always-evil “opt-out” stance, and will not yield. If the writer Kottke quoted wanted to opt-in under an “opt-in” system, that would be a different thing; but Google is trying to pretend that they have the “right” to republish our work without paying us for it, and if we say “pretty please” they will allow us to opt-out.
Last time a “service” put anything I wrote on line (and offered reprints of the full article, for pay), they didn’t notify me, much less pay me; if it weren’t for a lawsuit filed by the National Writers Union, I wouldn’t have known the copyright infringement ever happened. Is that really acceptable in your eyes?