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Well, they don't want to show any restraint, AFAIK. The saga of clueless/greedy/whatever authors against technology is much larger than this particular case, e.
by Jun8 14y ago
Well, they don't want to show any restraint, AFAIK. The saga of clueless/greedy/whatever authors against technology is much larger than this particular case, e.g. just two days ago it was reported that the Author's Guild is seeking $2B from Google for book scanning and making snippets available, that's $750 for each book! Many authors back these efforts.
My (optimistic) feeling is that a small circle of businesses is brainwashing the authors, citing music piracy and the "success" of RIAA in suing pirates and the authors are taking the bait.
- anthonyb 14y agoWhy is $750 per book so outrageous? Books on average would make far more than that, so it doesn't seem completely out of the question.
- noonespecial 14y ago$750 isn't outrageous... For the authors to pay to Google for that kind if publicity/advertising.
- anthonyb 14y agoIt's not specifically publicity or advertising though, is it? They're indexing the entire text and making that available publicly.
- beedogs 14y ago$750 for book excerpts seems pretty outrageous to me. They're not putting a complete copy up.
- ktizo 14y agoMost books don't break even. Also, many books scanned by google are not easily available, out of print, or out of copyright, so I would be very surprised if google is costing authors anything like $750 per book. In fact I would suspect, if anything, it will help drive book sales.
- anthonyb 14y agoThe other thing that crossed my mind is that Google is still making use of the books - I doubt that just making them available publicly is part of their plan. If they're also licensing them for spelling correction and translation, how does that affect the pricing?