Google Print

Prompted by Why we believe in Google Print and Publishers Challenge Google's Book Efforts (WSJ - subscription required). Yes, I read them in that order. I have to side with Google on this one. I really thing the advantage of being able to digitally search the full content of millions of printed pages far outweighs the potential downside of possible theft of work. If this were really a copyright issue, then why aren't the publishers suing libraries? I haven't checked, but did publishers try to outlaw libraries when they started? This is really an extension of the concept of a card catalog. If I were doing research today, this would be exactly what I wanted. Come to think of it... whenever I want to know about something, I first type it into Google. If I find enough out of free, online content, then I'm satisfied. But it would be very nice if I also got back information in published works that I could then go check out from the library, or purchase from some outlet or another. What if I could buy a digital copy of that work, at a discount from the printed copy? What if I could take that work and order a printed copy that was published on-demand (ala www.lulu.com). Now I'm starting to see why the publishing industry is so scared of this. It completely rips apart their business model, and they lose control. Let's ponder their model for a minute. Publishers find a few authors, promote them, print a lot of books, push those books into stores, and pay the authors after they make up the cost of printing all those books and promoting them. For a few cases, this might be different, and if I'm really far off, please let me know. The value-add that the publishers are bringing to the table is both the promotion, and the relationships with the booksellers -- not the actual printing of the books, which turns out to be a negative for the author. I believe the search mechanism will actually drive more people towards purchasing books, but publishers would really have to adapt to handle the influx of requests for works they aren't necessarily promoting. If they could handle on-demand printing, then perhaps they wouldn't be so worried, but that would requre significant captial investment. This is the kind of technology that shifts the world. Anytime you do that, people get scared. Change is often feared.