Was just checking out a quick story about Google Print:
I understand the concern that many publishers have over letting Google scan all of the books on the planet, but according to their article above, 80% of them are currently available in public domain or are not available for reprint anymore anyway.
I guess the concern though is that publishers think people won’t go buy a book anymore if you can get the full text of it available online. The problem with that thought is this though from my own recent experience. Reading through my article again was a pain, the scanning resolution was okay, but nothing “easy” to read, so I can’t imagine attempting to read an entire novel in that way. You also can’t select the actual text of the book to copy/paste it into another document, which I think is a good thing.
I see the benefit is exactly the same benefit as our nation’s public libraries, which aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be because of the technology of the world wide web. I believe Google Print will allow anyone to have access to printed materials for research and study. And since I’m sure it will take quite awhile to do it, I say Google should just go ahead and work hard at scanning that 80% and by the time they get done with that, part of the 20% will have probably switched to the 80% and they can keep going!
Besides, I’m sure that Barne’s & Noble, Amazon.com and BeanBooks, LLC would love to have people come to their site because of a portion of a book they were able to read online to see if they liked it. And come to think of it, hasn’t Amazon had the ability to search inside and read books on their website for awhile now? Is it so bad, just because it’s Google now?