PBS Newshour Report Ventilates Google Books Debate
Open Book Alliance points out that improving search helps Google's bottom line
-- Library Journal, 01/04/2010
- Google's ally is a librarian
- Criticism from Open Book Alliance
- Samuelson warns about pricing
Here are some quotes from a December 30, 2009 PBS NewsHour report on Google Book Search (see below for video). The Open Book Alliance seized on Google's unsurprising admission that it aims to improve search, given that search is Google's economic bread-and-butter.
MICHAEL KELLER, Stanford University Librarian: What happens when you digitize these books and make them accessible on the Net is that they get a lot more use. People can find the stuff, 10 times more use than formerly was recorded.
GARY REBACK, attorney, Open Book Alliance: What Google is proposing here is not like any library you have ever been to. It's not a public library. It's a private library. And it's being run for profit, big profits. Google is going to charge university scholars, ordinary people, even schoolchildren, to get access to books that Google copied without the permission of the publisher or the author.
DANIEL CLANCY, engineer Google Books: Google hopes to benefit from it by improving our search. And we expect that we will make some money as we sell the books. But the motivation is not the money we're going to make from selling books, because, if you look at what we're investing, it's far greater than that.
PAM SAMUELSON, professor, University of California-Berkeley: There really are not checks and balances in the agreement about -- about pricing strategies. And it seems like, the more books that Google scans, the higher the prices can be. The entire thing transformed itself into a commercial enterprise. It's basically turned this project into a bookstore, rather than a library.
