Publishers have mixed reactions about Google Library Scanning Project: the positive, “boosting sales of obscure titles” and the negative, “hurt industry’s long-term revenues”.


Anick Jesdanun, AP Internet Writer, (via Yahoo News) analyses the reactions of publishers some who are for the Google Library Scanning Project and some who are against it.

The report mentions Tony Sanfilippo who “is of two minds when it comes to Google Inc.’s ambitious program to scan millions of books and make their text fully searchable on the Internet”.

Sanfilippo of Penn State University Press is happy that Google’s Project helps in “boosting sales of obscure titles” but he is also worried that the facility to get digital books directly from libraries “could hurt his industry’s long-term revenues”.

The copyright laws which have been made prior to the arrival of Internet will be tested in this digital age when Google’s book-scanning program resumes in earnest this fall.

Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, which runs smaller book-scanning projects, mostly for out-of-copyright works says, “More and more people are expecting access, and they are making do with what they can get easy access to. Let’s make it so that they find great works rather than whatever just happens to be on the Net”.

Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet legal scholar affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities, says the book-scanning dispute comes down balancing commercial and social benefits. He says, “From the point of view of the publishers, you can’t blame them for playing their role, which is to maximize sales. But if fair use wasn’t found, (Google) would never be able to do the mass importation of books required to make a database that is socially useful”.

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