Do you approve of Google Books?

Google Books is going through heated competition from various technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon as well as with publishers, authors and lawmakers. There is a pending court settlement on this matter and while Google’s intentions are beneficial to millions of people, the copyright holders are not happy on this.

Sergey Brin who is a co-founder and the President of Technology over at Google has written an article over at New York Times titled “A Library to Last Forever” wherein he defends the company’s viewpoint on their development of Google Books.

Sergey explains that books gets lost forever and he cites the article written in 1916 about electric cars on the Electric Journal which was almost lost, had it not been in the public domain. He contends that today we all talk about electric cars, but these things where already extensively studied almost a century ago. He argues that books published after 1923 gets lost in a literary black hole and nobody recalls them anymore except for tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries.

Next, Sergey says that paper is temporal and books continually gets lost to age, improper care and disasters. Amazon would not like this viewpoint as they are trying to digitize everything via their Kindle device and instead of people shipping out books in paper, they would rather get them wirelessly. Having said that, Amazon is going to argue on this against Google Books.

Sergey defends Google Books on the author and publishers belief that they are being cheated. Sergey says this is not the case as the authors themselves control the pricing and access of their works in Google Books. “Orphaned” books however will be subject to default rules on pricing and access, and revenues would be stored in case the author re-appear. Thousands of these authors might have already passed away with no one else to claim the revenues. So what would Google do with these unclaimed money?

Finally, Sergey says that no one else wants to do what they are doing and they are not locking out other vendors or creating a monopoly. There are vendors in this business like Amazon whose Kindle device and vision of digitizing books, magazines, journals is just starting up. You have other paid vendors like Microsoft’s Books24×7 or Coverleaf which put magazines online. There are so many vendors in various forms who are already in this business and Google is just trying to index all these books in one big sweep to lock out the competition.

Anyways, the idea of Google Books is awesome and while publishers and authors are not happy with it, I believe this is going to benefit the world. While there are Books24×7 who have digitized thousands and thousands of books, paying hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees is a “no” “no”.

For this one, I am routing on Google and hopefully things go out well as Judge Denny Chin has put a deadline on the revised settlement (more information found on the Google Books settlement).

How about you? Do you approve of Google Books? If you are a publisher or author, most likely you are against these guys. As a reader, you would like the Google Books concept.

Image from Google Books.