Comments on: Authors To Universities: Give Up Your Google Books http://paidcontent.org/2011/09/13/419-authors-to-universities-give-up-your-google-books/ The economics of digital content Sat, 25 May 2013 21:53:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Alexandra Reed Lajoux http://paidcontent.org/2011/09/13/419-authors-to-universities-give-up-your-google-books/#comment-85242 Sun, 06 Nov 2011 07:27:27 +0000 http://paidcontent.wp.gostage.it/2011/09/13/419-authors-to-universities-give-up-your-google-books/#comment-85242 I appreciate the Author’s Guild for its worthy mission and work, but I side with the university libraries on this one. Making orphan works available at a low/zero cost to scholars and students sounds like a great idea to me. I don’t see how digitizing orphan works can harm us authors or our estates, since our works are not orphans. And there is little comparison/competition between demand for the two kinds of works.

As a side note, I have a very good feeling about the long-delayed Google book settlement, which could occur in 2012. Thanks to a wise judiciary and cogent arguments from all parties involved, it’s going to be a big win-win-win.

]]> By: Knowles2 http://paidcontent.org/2011/09/13/419-authors-to-universities-give-up-your-google-books/#comment-85241 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:38:21 +0000 http://paidcontent.wp.gostage.it/2011/09/13/419-authors-to-universities-give-up-your-google-books/#comment-85241 If they throw in the towel in the Google case. Then surely we are back to the argument on whether Google is able to treat books like it treats websites ie able to scan them freely and create and index of all there content and then allow other people to search that index and see snippets from those books with out informing authors.

This is exactly what Google does to websites and I do not think anyone has won a legal case against Google for doing that. 

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