RE: Darnton on the Google settlement

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Three quick observations on Rick's observations:

1) I must demur somewhat on Rick's claim that "Google elected to
    absorb effectively all of the up-front costs and labor
    involved in this remarkable project." 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. And I suppose
    librarians from the participating libraries would point to the
    significant labor involved in making books available to Google
    for digitization.

2) Google's investment of $125 million is trivial when compared
    with (a) the costs that would have been incurred in pursuing
    the suit all the way to resolution in the courts and (b) the
    37% royalty that Google will receive as its share of all
    revenues derived from fee-based uses under the settlement,
    which vastly exceeds the normal royalty that authors receive
    from publishing their books--and Google has, remember, not
    contributed any content at all itself, just the technology.

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.
    Universities had the infrastructure already in place, through
    university presses, to take on this task, but chose not to do
    so, and they have continued to underinvest in their presses,
    allowing well-capitalized commercial companies to take
    advantage of new opportunities when they arise much more
    quickly and adeptly than university presses are able to do.
    So, it strikes me that, as with Google taking the lead in
    digitization of books, universities opted not to make the
    investments necessary to dominate this business themselves and
    control it in their own best interests. Do we have anyone to
    blame but ourselves if the commercial sector is always one
    step ahead in exploiting intellectual property for its benefit
    rather than the public good?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>>  I need to reread the piece, but it does seem to omit any
>>  expression of gratitude towards Google for having stepped in
>>  where the public sector did not act or for having fought
>>  through the tangles of copyright to get to the settlement.
>
>Sorry for submitting another lengthy rant (did you miss me?), 
>but to pursue Jim's point here for a second: the sourness with 
>which many of us have greeted the Google settlement is very 
>disappointing.  Sometimes I think we've actually made an art out 
>of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Look at what 
>the Google settlement has done: the general public now has far 
>better (though still imperfect) access to vastly more literary 
>and scientific writing than it ever has had before.  This access 
>is, by any sane definition of the term, free.  (More 
>comprehensive access is available at a price, but what's 
>available at no charge is still amazing.)  Even better, the 
>content to which we now have access is, for the first time ever, 
>fully searchable, and we can get it from our homes and around 
>the clock.  Better still, the public has paid virtually nothing 
>in return for what it now gets -- Google elected to absorb 
>effectively all of the up-front costs and labor involved in this 
>remarkable project, gambling that it will recoup its investment 
>later by a combination of advertising, microcharges, and the 
>brokering of book purchases at radically discounted prices.
>
>Are the access terms perfect?  Of course not.  It would be 
>wonderful if GBS actually covered everything ever published, if 
>there were no restrictions at all on downloading, if access to 
>copyrighted publications were provided under the same terms as 
>access to public-domain content, if there were no advertising 
>involved, if Google were a grassroots nonprofit collective 
>devoted to developing alternative energy sources and feeding 
>abandoned cats, and if free access to massive amounts of 
>high-quality information automatically turned the general public 
>into sophisticated researchers.
>
>But for crying out loud.  How fantastic does a gift have to be 
>before we can acknowledge that it's great?  Speaking as a 
>librarian, I guess it would be easier for us to do so if the 
>fantastic deal didn't threaten our own position in the scholarly 
>marketplace.  But we'd better get used to the threat and figure 
>out how to reposition ourselves, because our patrons need no 
>convincing about what GBS can do for them -- and our sour-faced 
>attempts to convince them otherwise make us look not only 
>clueless, but also desperate and self-centered.  That's not a 
>good image for a publicly-funded service provider to project 
>during a deep recession.
>
>---
>Rick Anderson
>Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
>Marriott Library
>University of Utah
>rick.anderson@utah.edu