A Library to Last Forever

Sergey Brin makes a convincing case:<p>&#62;The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.<p>I did my PhD thesis pre-web! I wrote to authors to get copies of PhD theses and obscure books. It took months to assemble material that I needed. I am for it although I dislike the current form of Google Books, but as Sergey says, there is opportunity for competition here.

Isn't this a bit like preaching to the choir? At this point I would think the only people who oppose this are either the Google-overlord-fearing folk (who can never be appeased anyway), or other companies who are suddenly alarmed that they didn't have the balls to make a first move in this space.<p>To the latter - tough cookie. To the former I would like to ask this: other than the shadow of the Big G, what do you truly see wrong with Google Books?

Seems like a reasonable and cogent response to some of the anti-Google sentiment that has been floating around.<p>Although I'm not a huge fan of the Google/Guild arrangement -- I would have preferred a true solution, in the form of orphan works legislation, but I know that's unlikely -- it seems like the best hope for saving orphan works and getting them into a format where they can be preserved and used. I hope that where Google goes, others will follow, as has been the case with some of their other products.

This was written by one of Brin's staff (probably), and I have to wonder why a semi-reputable institution like the nytimes would publish a public relations piece like this as an op-ed.<p>Anyway, if google released all of these books in the wild, you could bet your ass that they would sue-to-death anyone who crawled and re-published them.

I work for the Internet Archive, which has agitated against the Google Books Settlement, but I don't work on the Archive's books projects and I speak only for myself here.<p>In my opinion, Google Books is wonderful. The problem is the Settlement. It's an abuse of the class-action process to obtain certain monopolistic privileges -- making Google the only company with the right to preemptively scan out-of-print books while waiting for authors to come forward.<p>It was wrong for the Author's Guild to be given class status sufficient for them to grant that blanket permission. It was wrong for Google to choose a purely self-interested bilateral settlement with the Guild rather than continuing their original fight for the very same fair use principles that enabled searching the web -- the presumptive right to index even copyrighted material as a transformative use.<p>Brin is justifiably proud of their technical progress scanning so many books, but that early lead is not, as Brin implies, a reason to grant the leader even more privileges -- as the default scanner, the default collector of fees, and the de facto manager of the entire 'Rights Registry'.<p>Instead, that early lead is a reason for extra scrutiny, to ensure that no cartel-like arrangements or effective monopolies arise -- either organically or by court order -- that reduce competition and author/reader choice.