The problem with Google

Pickering & Chatto publisher William Rees-Mogg outlines some to the difficulties facing the academic presses. Here is one of them:

Google has reached agreement with a number of major libraries to scan their whole collections; these include Stanford and Harvard and two British copyright libraries, the British Museum and the Bodleian, which receive all locally published books free. Indeed, Pickering & Chatto subsidises the five copyright libraries by about £45,000 a year in free books, a significant cost for a small publisher. Of course, the British Library does not acquire the copyright as well as the free books.

Factor in the cost to the reader of academic press books and it isn't difficult to see the larger potential problem.

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Google rent-a-book

Mercenary lending library or good idea?

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Agenda 4: Think of the children, Google

The Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity is very irritated with Google's new access initiative. It holds the copyright to Barrie's Peter Pan in perpetuity.

The charity says that royalties earned from Peter Pan stand at the "very core" of its fundraising efforts. Google has angered the charity by making a text of the children’s classic available online as part of the Google Print Library Project, a scheme to make thousands of books available on the net, but which has already attracted controversy from publishers and authors' organisations in Britain and the United States.

Being generous just got even more complicated, didn't it, Mr. Google?

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