Tom Turvey, On Google Print: Don't Fear the Web, The Book Standard, October 21, 2005. Turvey is a strategic partner development manager for Google, and part of his work is marketing Google Print to book publishers in the UK. Excerpt:
[A]s the web makes it easier for people to find more diverse content, we believe authors and publishers will be among this program's primary beneficiaries. Google Print, for instance, puts backlist titles --which comprise the majority of books in print but just a fraction of publishers' marketing budgets-- one search away from discovery, perhaps purchase. When Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope, for example, millions of people searching on his name saw the Google Print listing for his book In the Beginning, thousands viewed a few of its pages, and clicks on the "Buy this Book" links increased tenfold. We expect similar benefits from the Library Project. Today, a lack of full-text search makes it difficult to explore the extraordinary collections at Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Oxford and the New York Public Library. All five institutions, though, have joined our Library Project. Imagine the cultural impact when their millions of volumes exist in a comprehensive card catalogue, every word of which is searchable. This vision will be realisable only if we protect the intellectual investment that lies behind every copyright. That's why users who find in-copyright books from our Library Program see only basic information, and why we'll continue to balance user benefit with author and publisher protections. "The potential book market," writes Wired editor Chris Anderson, "may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity." That's precisely what the web is best at, and precisely what we hope Google Print will accomplish.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/23/2005 01:50:00 PM.
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.
