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19 Oct 2009 07:26 am
Google Plays Librarian
Erick Schonfeld deciphers what the internet hegemon is really up to:
Google is not digitizing these books so it can sell copies of them.
They are out of print for a reason. There is no market for them as
whole books. Their value lies in cutting them up into snippets and
relevant excerpts, and showing those snippets along with search ads to
people looking for related information. The reason they are valuable to
Google is because they are a rich source of high quality information
that will improve its search results, and in fact give them an
information advantage over other search engines without equal access to
the world’s books.
There would be some value in printing them out via the espresso book machine. The demand for any individual out of print book is small but the sum demand for all out of print books is significant. When doing a run of one costs the same as doing a run of 10,000 such exchanges suddenly become profitable. Alan Jacobs has mixed feelings.
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