Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Chris Nuttall, Google writes its place in the world's history books, Financial Times, December 16, 2004. Excerpt: 'At the Bodleian, home to 8m books dating back 500 years, its inclusion in the Google Print project provoked comparisons with Gutenberg. "This could be almost as significant as the invention of the printing press in the sense that a great mass of information is going to be made available much more readily to people all over the world," said Ronald Milne of Oxford University's library services....It seemed to be a genuine meeting of minds, old and new - the analogue organisers of the world's information handing it on to a digital successor responsible for organising 8bn web pages according to random search requests. While no one doubts the nerdy librarian credentials of Google's chiefs, nor their altruism, there is also some smart business thinking behind the move. "Books are structured information that might inform [online] services yet to be created, such as question-answering," says John Battelle, author of a Web blog on the search industry....The project can be viewed as Google making its first serious move as a content provider, bringing struc tured information assets into its database....Much of Google Print's scanned output is likely to be books that are out of copyright. But Mr Battelle argues that Google can still make money from obscure titles; one request for a copy of an out-of-print book at $10-$15 a time would cover its scanning costs. "Media companies have always focused on the head - the big hits and bestseller lists - but digital music has shown there's a lot of power in the [back-catalogue] tail. There's a ludicrously large backlist in books and this could mean a massive new revenue stream." The networking power of the internet should also mean unlikely titles being discovered and creating their own buzz. "You are going to see some interesting new hits that haven't sold a copy since 1782," says Mr Battelle. "This really does fulfil a model of enlightened capitalism and it's going to do a lot of good." ' (PS: On the final point, or on the financial potential of a huge inventory of low-demand works, see Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, Wired, October 2004.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/16/2004 01:49:00 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.
