Re: Study suggests Google Book Search Helps Publishers A Lot More Than It Hurts Them

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

This paper suffers from the "first inning problem":  take a 
statistical snapshot when the game has just begun and extrapolate 
the results at the end.  I have no idea what the legal meaning of 
fair use is, but I don't think that Google's mass digitization 
can be said to have yet affected book sales one way or the other. 
We don't know what is going to happen ten years from now, and we 
don't know how Google will enhance their digitized collections. 
For that matter, we don't know (and we may never know) how 
publishers might have learned to exploit these books digitally 
had they not been preempted by Google. And while we are at it, 
let's not forget the real significance of mass digitization: 
data mining--that is, creating databases for machines to sift 
through, not for people to purchase at their local bookshop.

The jury will be out for some time on the implications of the 
Google project.

Joe Esposito

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 3:10 PM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Interesting paper from the Journal of the Copyright Society of
> the USA. It's authored by Hannibal Travis of the Florida
> International University College of Law.
>
>>From the abstract:
>
> "Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the
> prevailing account of mass book-digitization projects is that
> they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and
> its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels.
> Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of
> U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most-affected by
> it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon
> them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive
> impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the
> mechanisms of digitization's economic impact."
>
> Here's the abstract: http://bit.ly/bNNeLj
>
> You can get the full paper by clicking on a link in the abstract.
>
> Bernie Sloan