Interesting – Harvard has pulled out of their book scanning agreement with Google, saying the recent legal settlement with publishers doesn’t allow for the public access to Harvard’s text, as they’d previously agreed:
“The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable,” Darnton added, “especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”
From Harvard source, which to be fair, reads more like a hard bargaining position over price and access, than a sudden reversal of position to the concept of book scanning.
Harvard’s contribution was access to their Library’s copyrighted texts, and with three other Universities and the NY Public Libray still involved, I’m not sure this will massively affect the scope of Google’s Book repository, but a major University partner pulling out, especially over a warngle about public access, can’t be good PR for Google.
I’m still catching up on people’s thoughts around this (all part of my informal ‘research’ into modrn publishing), and got around to reading Lawrence Lessig’s thoughts. He’s a lot more bullish, and in broad terms, would seem to disagree with Harvard on the issue of public access:
“But key to the good in the agreement is that we don’t have to trust the nonprofit to do good here. Google has committed both to making the data it can control (not private data about telephone numbers and contact info, but public data about copyright registration, terms, etc.) nonexclusively available, and more importantly, downloadable by anyone who wants to build a competing and complementary database. It has also reserved important safe-harbors for its incredibly valuable public domain collection (which includes books people get free access to, and can download for free).”
Lessig’s always been bullish on Google Books as ‘fair use’, so its interesting to see the difference of opinion here.