Google's World Brain

I've often wondered how Google convinces libraries, such as Harvard, to allow the super-rich company to digitize books for free. Now I know. A new documentary "Google and the World Brain", which, by the way, is described by TechCrunch as a very anti-Google movie, explains: "They pitch it as a way to avert disasters like the burning of Alexandria or the flooding of Tulane University’s library during Hurricane Katrina." Of course, any librarian worth his or her salt would want to avoid a disaster. But authors, in particular the Author's Guild, have objected and asked the courts for $3 billion from Google for scanning copyrighted books. However the Guild settled for $125 million; but then a District Court judge dismissed the settlement. So we are unresolved. The bottom line to understand about all this is that Google is not interested in making books available for reading as much wanting to mine the data for all its worth.

Don't be Turrowed

Don't be Turrowed, as in Scott Turrow, the president of the Author's Guild, who argued in a New York Times piece that ebooks would be the end of authors. Libraries have shot back, not wanting to be Turrowed. Mareen Sullivan, President of the American Library Association, has written, also in an oped piece for the New York Times: "It is not in the long-term interests of authors (or publishers) to deny library e-lending and the educational benefits it affords." Libraries are adamantly and wonderfully trying to make ebook lending a way of life for Americans. So everyone who can't see that ebooks and print books can coexist have been Turrowed. Don't be Turrowed.