In an attempt to work with publishers and others opposed to the Google Book Search project, Google today announced its first plan for publishers to provide --for a price-- the full text of books online. Though the agreement, publishers can decide to have the full text of books available through Google’s program while the publisher still has control over the price—which they can change whenever they want. Google will take a portion of the profit, similar to an ad-revenue share model. “Virtually every partner we have spoken to has been extremely enthusiastic,” said Google executive Jim Gerber, Publisher’s Marketplace reported.
Comment. This development isn't directly related to OA, so I won't be covering it in depth. But it may increase the number of publishers willing to let Google digitize their books and, therefore, enlarge the corpus of book literature indexed for free, full-text searching. It won't improve our access for reading, but it will improve our access for searching.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/11/2006 09:50:00 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.
