Chronicle article: Presses Have Little to Fear From Google

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Address for subscribers:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i44/44b01601.htm

By MICHAEL JENSEN
(of the National Academies Press)

The hot session at the recent annual meeting of the Association of
American University Presses had to be moved to a half-ballroom to
accommodate interest. Nearly 200 publishers listened patiently as the
first two speakers talked about various online opportunities for scholarly
presses, but the crowd was mostly there to hear -- and interrogate -- the
third presenter: the "Google guy."

Last December Google announced its Google Library Project, to digitize the
books of five major university libraries over the next decade -- millions
of volumes, starting with out-of-copyright material, but expected to
include out-of-print and other books still in copyright. The project, an
expansion of Google Print, a program to make traditionally printed
material searchable online, first caused great alarm in many quarters.
Soon after the announcement, the university-press association sent a
strongly worded letter to the Google leadership about the
intellectual-property incursions the Library Project seemed to represent.
Then a few weeks ago, word circulated through the corridors at the
university-press meeting that the Association of American Publishers had
just sent a similar letter: It asked Google to cease scanning copyrighted
works for at least six months to enable all parties to sit down to thrash
out the issues. ...

In 2004, when Google first met with publishers to enlist them in Google
Print, the response was one of guarded interest. Publishers were told that
the program would involve giving a copy of a book to Google, which would
scan the pages and make them searchable online. Digital-character
recognition would be used to perform the searches, but strict default
limits on the interface would mean that no more than 20 percent of any
book would be available to a user; a publisher could set its own
constraints on how much of the book could be presented.

Many university presses considered Google Print a big risk. ... I
understand the fears, but I think most of them are unfounded. And I think
they could lead publishers to miss some crucial opportunities.

First, I doubt that participating libraries -- or Google -- would risk
directly taking on copyright law in the current pro-ownership political
environment. Moreover, it's clear to me that the control of intellectual
property by publishers is not threatened by Google Print or Library. My
own National Academies Press started participating in Google Print early
in the program. Google has already scanned more than 1,300 of our titles,
with another 1,000 pending, and we are sending it more all the time ... At
present, reaching selected audiences is the hardest problem publishers
face. How do you find the 300 people who most care about the political
genesis of the Maginot Line? It's one of our most expensive pursuits,
often dwarfing production costs.

... the new digitally driven scholars can Google an essay or book, then
they'll use it for further research. If they can't, they may well not. If
university-press monographs are not available via Google, then they will
be more likely to be losers in the citation-index derby. That will have
significant consequences a few years out. ...

See links for rest of article...