Thursday, June 18, 2009

Librarians vs. Google

Not 27 Things related, but here's a story I ran across this morning at Time.com:

Librarians Fighting Google's Book Deal

I'm normally very pro-Google, and indeed I don't really think they are the bad guys here; this whole settlement came about from the same old story of information retailers with outdated business models whining and suing because the boat is leaving them behind. However, Google is certainly taking advantage of the situation, and libraries have a lot to lose should this go through and Google decides that it's not libraries' BFF anymore. Considering how they've suddenly lost interest in library tradeshows, it doesn't seem like such a large leap to imagine that they could hold libraries over a barrel with regards to pricing, academic journal style, if they come through this with no competition for rights to out-of-print books.

No comments:

Post a Comment