More on the Google Book Search Settlement

The library associations are right on this one. As I wrote in an earlier post, the usefulness of Google Book Search will come down to the price of the institutional licenses for libraries. The original libraries that opened their collections to Google for scanning did so because they thought that the resulting digitized texts would be available to their users and everyone else. Librarians did not participate in this to create a huge new revenue stream for the heirs of death authors and for brain dead publishers. If that was the deal, those authors and publishers could have rummaged through their own libraries to find the copies to digitize.