Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, October 22, 2005

Book author wants her book in Google Print

Book author to her publishing company: your lawsuit is not helping me or my book, Kottke.org, October 20, 2005. Jason Kottke quotes from letters and blog postings from Meghann Marco. Excerpt (quoting Marco):
I'm a book author. My publisher [Simon & Schuster] is suing Google Print and that bothers me. I'd asked for my book to be included, because gosh it's so hard to get people to read a book [but Simon & Schuster refused.]...Kinda sucks for me, because not that many people know about my book and this might help them find out about it. I fail to see what the harm is in Google indexing a book and helping people find it. Anyone can read my book for free by going to the library anyway. In case you guys haven't noticed, books don't have marketing like TV and Movies do. There are no commercials for books, this website isn't produced by my publisher. Books are driven by word of mouth. A book that doesn't get good word of mouth will fail and go out of print. Personally, I hope that won't happen to my book, but there is a chance that it will. I think the majority of authors would benefit from something like Google Print.