>The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
I did my PhD thesis pre-web! I wrote to authors to get copies of PhD theses and obscure books. It took months to assemble material that I needed. I am for it although I dislike the current form of Google Books, but as Sergey says, there is opportunity for competition here.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country
That's not true at all. An astonishing number of out-of-print books are available used through Abebooks and Amazon. This "unicorn" canard is an intelligence-insulting flaw in what is otherwise a pretty good piece. He repeats it in another place too:
[Out-of-print books] are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores.
It's ironic, or rather disingenuous, that Brin would make this argument as if the internet didn't exist. The situation he describes is the one that book-hunters had to deal with pre-web.
Nevertheless, I think Google Books is, without any exaggeration, a great contribution to civilization. I was at Stanford when they first started advocating the project. It was widely regarded as a vain extravagance and/or futuristic pipe-dream. That they went ahead and got it done anyway is one of the things I most respect about Google, or more precisely Brin and Page, because as far as I can tell this was all them. It is an outstanding example of what visionary founders can do.
Lots and lots of books are available used, but the ones at the end of the "long tail" aren't and probably never will be, and that's the most exciting thing about this for me. I have actually done as he described and traveled to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington DC just to visit libraries that had books that didn't exist anywhere else, and would have been grateful to be able to pay for scans instead of making the trip.
Isn't this a bit like preaching to the choir? At this point I would think the only people who oppose this are either the Google-overlord-fearing folk (who can never be appeased anyway), or other companies who are suddenly alarmed that they didn't have the balls to make a first move in this space.
To the latter - tough cookie. To the former I would like to ask this: other than the shadow of the Big G, what do you truly see wrong with Google Books?
There are some issues with the legality of it. Gojomo (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870926) summarized it better than I will, most likely. Although I'm for the process itself, the legal side seems a tad shady to me. I realize it would be a logistical nightmare to attempt to get permission from all authors, but the opt-out clause with such a short time frame didn't seem entirely fair. I'm glad that they gave an extension to it, and that the repercussions of the settlement are being looked at harder. Once again, I'm definitely for such a project, and I'm not a google-fearer, but something of this magnitude deserves some careful examination.
Seems like a reasonable and cogent response to some of the anti-Google sentiment that has been floating around.
Although I'm not a huge fan of the Google/Guild arrangement -- I would have preferred a true solution, in the form of orphan works legislation, but I know that's unlikely -- it seems like the best hope for saving orphan works and getting them into a format where they can be preserved and used. I hope that where Google goes, others will follow, as has been the case with some of their other products.
I work for the Internet Archive, which has agitated against the Google Books Settlement, but I don't work on the Archive's books projects and I speak only for myself here.
In my opinion, Google Books is wonderful. The problem is the Settlement. It's an abuse of the class-action process to obtain certain monopolistic privileges -- making Google the only company with the right to preemptively scan out-of-print books while waiting for authors to come forward.
It was wrong for the Author's Guild to be given class status sufficient for them to grant that blanket permission. It was wrong for Google to choose a purely self-interested bilateral settlement with the Guild rather than continuing their original fight for the very same fair use principles that enabled searching the web -- the presumptive right to index even copyrighted material as a transformative use.
Brin is justifiably proud of their technical progress scanning so many books, but that early lead is not, as Brin implies, a reason to grant the leader even more privileges -- as the default scanner, the default collector of fees, and the de facto manager of the entire 'Rights Registry'.
Instead, that early lead is a reason for extra scrutiny, to ensure that no cartel-like arrangements or effective monopolies arise -- either organically or by court order -- that reduce competition and author/reader choice.
This was written by one of Brin's staff (probably), and I have to wonder why a semi-reputable institution like the nytimes would publish a public relations piece like this as an op-ed.
Anyway, if google released all of these books in the wild, you could bet your ass that they would sue-to-death anyone who crawled and re-published them.
It's not at all unusual for newspapers to publish op-eds from the people involved in the big stories of the day. This is especially true for political candidates.
>The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
I did my PhD thesis pre-web! I wrote to authors to get copies of PhD theses and obscure books. It took months to assemble material that I needed. I am for it although I dislike the current form of Google Books, but as Sergey says, there is opportunity for competition here.