RE: Darnton on the Google settlement

["Rick Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> There is, alas, a very
>     significant amount of labor involved for publishers to
>     investigate what digital rights they have in the books Google
>     has digitized and to negotiate with authors over display and
>     other types of rights they share under the settlement. This is
>     hardly just a "free ride" for publishers.

True -- it's essentially a free ride for the general public, but not for
publishers.  However, my understanding (which may be flawed) is that
publishers who choose not to participate can withdraw their books from
the program very easily, and therefore end up no worse off than they
were before the project.


> And I suppose
>     librarians from the participating libraries would point to the
>     significant labor involved in making books available to Google
>     for digitization.

I'd love to hear from participant libraries on this score.  How much
labor was it for them?  Of course, we should bear in mind that those
libraries got more out of the project than the general public does; they
got permanent, complete, locally-held copies of the digitized books from
their own collections.


> Google has, remember, not
>     contributed any content at all itself, just the technology.

Google also contributed massive amounts of labor.  That's not trivial
either.


> 3) Rick's reminder to librarians that this settlement provides a
>     great deal more access to more books than people have ever had
>     before makes me think that the same could be said about the
>     whole STM publishing industry. Librarians like to complain
>     about "locked up" content, high prices, etc., but the reality
>     is that if the commercial sector had not stepped in to support
>     the rapid growth of science in the wake of WW II, we would all
>     be a lot poorer for it in terms of available resources.

Couldn't agree more.


---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
801-721-1687