Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Leecher chronicles

Google's book scanning/search project is running into troubled waters. Much as I would like all books and their text neatly accessible and seachable under a clean, spare interface, issues linger...

From here: Google’s entire business model is the commoditization of other people’s content. See Google News, Gmail, AdSense/Adwords, etc. Book Search puts Google in the driver’s seat of determining how online books are monetized, at what rates, what share Google, authors and publishers get, how the metrics are determined. Books are reduced to data. Competitors are cut out. Other players remain unable to use the orphan works. Google leverages the audience. Newspapers will die because they have been commoditized out of existence (with some fatal mistakes of their own along the way.) Do we really want books to go the same way?

1 comment:

SG said...

I really sitting down with a book to read than having to read online..though of course when the days are really packed the advantages of reading online and getting information at the click of a button is exciting..