I had found it amusing and slightly confusing that book publishers wanted to sue Google in order to halt the scanning of books and making them available online via searches. I'm of mindset that if they allowed for this, it'd actually drive increased book sales. It's like the argument for mp3 versions of music - the wider the distribution is, good content will always be appreciated and bought. But ok, I was willing to acknowledge that the publishers were just trying to protect their content.
Then I read that HarperCollins is going to kick off their own initiative to scan their own books and make them available to the major search engines to crawl/index. So now I really don't get it? They are opposed to it and yet they are going ahead and doing it themselves? To make the whole scenario just a little more perplexing is this...
"This is going to be a costly initiative," she said, adding that a budget had not yet been set but the cost was expected to run into millions of dollars. The publisher has invited proposals from vendors to carry out the contract to digitize some 20,000 or more books in the global back-catalogue as well as the 3,500 to 5,000 new books it publishes each year.
...so you didn't want Google to do it for you, for free, but your willing to spend millions of dollars to have some vendor do it for you?
In all honesty, what I think this is really pointing to is that Google is suffering from what most companies who become successful suffer from: people start to hate you for that success. People love the underdog right? So when it was Google-the-little-guy battling Microsoft-the-big-guy, well everyone cheered for Google (go Google go). But Google isn't the little-guy anymore and so we can expect people to want to oppose ideas from them, even when they make sense. It's either that or the publishing industry really doesn't understand what they are doing - I'm not sure which state is the more comical.
If you'd like to read the whole article, just click here.
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