Nick Webb, Digitalization, Google and all that...., EPS Google Debate, September 28, 2005. Webb is the former Marketing Director of Simon & Schuster UK. Excerpt:
If Google succeeds with this project – even if it starts only with public domain titles – it will be able to offer the most seductive information service on the planet....Why will the Google service be unbeatable? Because it will make the greatest archive on Earth searchable. That’s the archive called All the Books in the World....Universal digitization will make it easy to publish, but exceedingly difficult to pay for anything new to be written....Perhaps an author will eventually make as much from downloads as he or she would have earned from an advance – maybe more. But the money will come after the work is published....Come on, I hear you saying, publishers will still pay advances. Yes, but against what – and when? If traditional book sales fall – as surely they must – the paper version of the work will become a bibliophile’s indulgence, generating less income, though possibly at better margins....If GoogleWorld really takes off, authors will also have to ask themselves what publishers bring to the party. It will not be distribution. Individuals and great corporations will have the same access to a global network. Publishers will offer the cachet of their imprint, their editing skills and panache at marketing. Authors are often bitterly cynical about these virtues, especially the last. Will there be enough money in the GoogleWorld environment for proper marketing budgets?...GoogleWorld offers a potentially brilliant resource, one I would use in a heartbeat. But it’s short-term. By plundering history, it undermines the economic basis of a market that in its bumbling and inefficient way has served as a repository of culture and learning (and a deal of crap too, it must be said) for centuries.
(PS: Webb assumes without evidence --in fact, contrary to mounting evidence-- that Google Print will decrease rather than increase the sale of priced, printed books.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/29/2005 01:51:00 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.
