Publishers have been left divided over Google's plan to scan books digitally and make them searchable on-line. Opponents are concerned at potential violation of copyright and remain suspicious of how Google may seek to use scanned digital copies of books. Nigel Newton, chief executive of Bloomsbury, publisher of the Harry Potter saga, caused a stir at last week's London Book Fair when he called on internet users to boycott Google in protest over the book search project. He warned publishers of the danger of handing over their content to a third-party internet company. Academic publishers, however, support the Google project, which they see as opening up new audiences and marketing opportunities for their scholarly works. Ben Stebbing, head of sales and marketing at Manchester University Press, said: "The books we publish are typically very specialist - monographs of a professor's life work on say Ottoman artefacts - and would normally sell just 500 copies at most. Through Google book search we've got a free marketing tool reaching audiences we'd have no hope of reaching otherwise." Manchester University Press used to send out catalogues a few times a year to 10,000 academic institutions, libraries and booksellers across Europe, and another 40,000 in the US. After listing many titles on Google's book search, it has received more than 50,000 hits a week, resulting in what Mr Stebbing estimates to be "several thousand" additional sales....Mark le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors, said: "There is no consensus among authors. Academic writers see Google as a new and exciting way to help market books that have otherwise found it hard to secure space in bookstores, but more commercial writers are concerned that Google is building up this vast and profitable catalogue on top of copyrights for which they have not paid.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/13/2006 09:25:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
