Google has teamed up with the British Library to bring quarter of a million dusty tomes to the internet. That’s upwards of 40 million pages, with a potential cost of £40 million. Check out the full story at The Inquirer.

The British Library previously inked a deal to digitise 40 million newspaper pages with Brightsolid, with a similar price tag and a similar aim to preserve the past and provide greater access for researchers and the generally curious. You can read the full story at TechEye.

While these are of historical importance, Google has been trying for years to secure deals with authors and publishers to digitise their work and let users search through them, sometimes without direct permission from the copyright holder. Google promised it would only show select pages relevant to a user’s search and would link the user to the publisher’s website to buy the full book, but many were unhappy with the potential impact on sales and infringement of copyright.

A settlement that was reached in 2009 was rejected by a court earlier this year, ending Google’s plans to put all books online. However, the judge hinted that a deal could be made in the future, providing Google addressed all of the concerns raised by objectors. The question for authors is, do we want our books digitised by Google? Do we trust that only a sample of the text will be made available via search, and will it have a positive or negative impact on sales?

Personally I can see the benefits of a digital collection, but obviously when a book is still in copyright and there’s still a price tag involved it should be up to the author and/or publisher to decide how much of a sample should be made available. There should always be a sample, in my opinion, like the first chapter or few pages often made available on Amazon. But if a user can perform a search for the title of the second chapter through Google Books and be given access to that part of the book, potentially it could be abused to allow some people to read the entire text without purchasing it, which as an author I simply cannot support.


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