A response to the recent Google Books agreement by the Open Book Alliance is reported in the San Jose Mercury News for 14 November.
On Friday night, the advocacy group Open Book Alliance issued this response to the Google plan:
“Today, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released their revised book settlement proposal in an attempt to fix the deeply flawed legal agreement.
“Open Book Alliance co-chair Peter Brantley said, ‘Our initial review of the new proposal tells us that Google and its partners are performing a sleight of hand; fundamentally, this settlement remains a set-piece designed to serve the private commercial interests of Google and its partners. None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest. By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP, and the AG are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress’s role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.’”
Denny Chin, a United States District Court judge, is overseeing the Google books case.
From Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, in The New York Times.
Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments.
The settlement, of a 2005 lawsuit over Google’s ambitious plan to digitize books from major American libraries, outlined a plan to create a comprehensive database of in-print and out-of-print works. But the original agreement, primarily between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, drew much criticism.
The Justice Department and others said Google was potentially violating copyright law, setting itself up to unfairly control access to electronic versions of older books and depriving authors and their heirs of proper compensation.
To read more…
From John Carlo Bertot, Paul T. Jaeger, Charles R. McClure, Carla B. Wright, and Elise Jensen,
The findings … demonstrate that public libraries continue to expand the public access computing and Internet services and training available to patrons. As has been the case for several years, virtually all public libraries are connected to and offer public access to the Internet, with an increasing number offering wireless access as well. The vast majority also offer a range of services and training related to the Internet. While patron and community demand for Internet access, training, and services is so routinely extensive that most libraries cannot meet these needs during normal times, the unprecedented economic downturn has further stressed library resources through reduced operating hours and more demand for library services and resources — particularly Internet–based services (CNN, 2009). In addition, libraries continue to struggle with issues of infrastructure as the types of Internet–related services become more complex and bandwidth–intensive, require a range of building technology upgrades, and continual staff skills development.
More…
From Bruce McCall Vanity Fair
Hotel rooms now provide Gideon Bibles only as pay-per-view TV channels. Librarians recently thrown out of work are forced to take jobs assembling Kindles. The Cassandra Report forecasts that more than fifty warehouses across the U.S., long used as book storage and shipping centers, will shortly be converted to video-game facilities. Rare-book collectors are switching to classic Betamax movie videos of the 1970s and 1980s.
Dire omens indeed, in line with a recent survey that found that more than half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in the previous year—doubtless a conservative figure, because everybody lies about their reading habits. The trend toward a bookless society is gaining almost daily as a TV-besotted, iPhone-bedazzled, time-starved, speed-crazed populace becomes ever less willing to seek information and entertainment by concentrating their minds on endless lines of type.
More….
By Dennis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow Seed Magazine
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
More….
