RE: Google Print Home Page now offers searching

[Ross Atkinson <ra13@cornell.edu>]

Monographic publishers (unlike many journal publishers) seem to have no
practicable or systematic plans to make their publications electronically
accessible. There are e-book vendors,of course, but their hands are
seriously tied by the publishers--who insist upon very high prices and
sometimes very poor access. The more that scholarly work is written and
read online, the more problematic this (admittedly understandable)  
intransigence will become, especially in the humanities.

Jim is concerned that texts he needs have been scanned, and yet he is
being denied adequate access to them.  The more Google Print grows, the
more scholars are going to have the same experiences Jim has described. If
it is available, why can't they have it to use? I expect some real anger
on the part of students and scholars will develop.  They will say, as Jim
has, that this seems either daft or goofy.  But who is daft or goofy?  
Google, if they're smart (and they are), will say something implying that
they are not the daft and goofy ones--but rather it is the publishers who
are insisting upon such access restrictions.

This will place much more pressure upon monographic publishers finally to
find some solution to making their publications more accessible in an
online environment.  It will and should become clear to them that, if they
do not find such solutions, scholarly authors will be obliged to find some
other means to publish their work, so that it will be easily and more
openly accessible online.  -- I don't know if Google has a plan--but if
they do, and it is in fact to encourage scholarly monographic publishers
to make some long overdue changes in their access policies, then it seems
to me to be an excellent one; and Jim, and of course others, by getting
testy about the limitations of Google Print, are essential players in it.

---Ross

Ross Atkinson
Associate University Librarian
 for Collections
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-5301


At 18:39 6/8/2005 -0400, you wrote:
> Replying to David G.'s thoughtful note, but reading several others.  See
> his first paragraph first . . .
>
> On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, David Goodman wrote:
>
> > Dear Jim,
> >
> > When used this way as a search tool it is probably closest to think of
> > it as an expanded bibliographic index.  Once the book has been
> > identified, then it can be obtained through normal sources--one's own
> > library, interlibrary loan, etc.
>
> That's certainly the way it operates, but if I *know* that they have full
> text scanned and available, to approach it through an interface that (1)
> doesn't tell me what's in the collection (Adam Hodgkin's good point) and
> (2) that only lets me use the index to each book, but that (3) when I
> look up the actual page an index points to, I'm told that I must read no
> more than four other contiguous pages before putting the book back,
> getting up, walking around the room, and sitting down again, and then to
> find (4) that selected pages in essentially every book have been deleted
> at random out of respect for copyright law [the same sort of respect that
> primitive peoples banging apotropaic cutlery at an eclipse showed to the
> laws of astronomy] -- why then I have to think this whole thing is either
> daft or goofy, but I'm not sure which.  It will in all likelihood evolve,
> and I'm struck by the director of marketing for Google, quoted in CHE
> last week, saying that they want to find relationships with publishers
> that work for all parties -- they may indeed have a plan, but it
> resembles nothing so much as the plan to end the war in Vietnam that
> Richard Nixon had -- it was definitely a plan, he just wouldn't tell
> anybody what it was.  For now, it's a solution without a problem, a tool
> that few people are likely to make regular use of.  Perhaps if they spend
> a few hundred million more dollars, it will become useful.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.