This is mostly a link I want to remember, but if you’re in publishing, you’ll be interested too:
John Battelle’s Searchblog has a good post on what’s at stake for publishers and Google.
Quote: First, who is making the money? Second, who owns the rights to leverage this new innovation – the public, the publisher, or … Google? Will Google make the books it scans available for all comers to crawl and index? Certainly the answer seems to be no. Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others. That leaves a bad taste in the publisher’s mouths – they sense they are being disintermediated, and further, that Google is reinterpreting copyright law as they do it.
Battelle also points out that this is not just about books. Why couldn’t Google or anyone else scan and index video. “Look at who owns the book companies that are suing – ahhh, it’s Newscorp (Harper Collins), Viacom (Simon&Schuster), Time Warner (Little Brown).”