Gary Reback: Why the Technology Sector Should Care About Google Books

The 2nd comment sums up my feelings pretty well:<p>"If the argument is: better these books not be available to anyone than to have only Google have them, as it will make Google search too good — from my own consumer point of view, that doesn’t carry a lot of weight. Please do not seek to protect me from good search results.<p>If the argument is: Due to Google's activities, since we are on the precipice of having these books become available through one party, it would be preferable for them to be available to multiple parties, then I’d agree. But that is hardly a point to demonize Google for. We wouldn’t be having this discussion without their efforts."

Well, Google is above the law. In fact, lots of large corporations are above the law. Politicians are above the law.<p>What this google case does more than anything is support the idea of the decline of a nation of laws. We are no longer a nation of laws, we are a nation that rewards <i>law breakers</i>.<p>Google violated copyright law and are being permitted to benefit from that violation and that means the law doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, not if you're google anyway... or rich I suppose. I mean... what are the rules about who is subject to the law and who isn't?<p>That's what I don't know anymore. Politicians can break the law and corporations can break the law, but the people can't break the law... Apparently, individuals can't even have manga or carry around arabic flash cards.<p>It's really disgusting what is happening. It's not good.

His argument about of long tail item's value for sell of mass market items, is also true for any other market.<p>Amazon uses this in a clever way. For long tail items , it lets merchants sell their wares at it's site , with little cost to amazon.This lets amazon control the mass market sales.<p>But this can go further:now amazon controls the customer , and the data of the niche market sales. If amazon find a scalable way into niche market sales , it could easily disrupt all it's merchants.

Slightly off topic: I use books.google.com to keep track of books I want to read. Just recently that list of books got made public and retagged as "favorites". What's going on there?