August 21st, 2009
Industry fight against Google hurts education
Everyone knows I’m something of a Google devotee. I don’t think it’s without reason, though. Google’s Education Apps have allowed me to completely transform communication within our district this summer and provide state-of-the-art collaboration tools to teachers for free. Google’s Summer of Code puts 1000 students to work each year on valuable open source projects with top mentors worldwide.
The company is also making a whole lot of books available in an easy, online format. Whether through their “digital book ecosystem” or their Book Search, Google’s efforts will soon have many millions of books that students and teachers can access anytime, anywhere.
Priceless books are being scanned and preserved electronically and out of print works are suddenly available again. Some of this is being done for free; some allows Google to profit. In either case, educational institutions, whether primary, secondary, or post-secondary can benefit from an extraordinarily large online library, the likes of which could not be constructed without Google’s financial muscle.
As the BBC (and a good chunk of news and blog sources) reports,
Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.
They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.
The BBC article summarizes the settlement that has been the source of significant outcry against Google:
In that settlement, Google agreed to pay $125m (£76m) to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers could register works and receive compensation. Authors and publishers would get 70% from the sale of these books with Google keeping the remaining 30%.
Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.
From my perspective, as a budding author, if Google offered to feature my works and give me 70% of the profit from their sales, I’d be asking where to sign before you can say Sherman Antitrust Act. That’s really not the point, though. The point is that working against Google’s efforts in this area means that one of the few companies with the technology, wherewithal, financial incentives, and cash to accomplish the creation of an enormous online library resource may be prevented from doing so.
Should Google be able to profit from their work? You bet. Without some profit motive, it would be difficult for any company to justify the huge expenditure required to make this project a reality. Should they ensure that many of their services remain free and openly accessible to education? Yes indeedy. Instead of working to prevent Google from making these books available, let’s work to keep them accountable to education, where free and ready access to millions of books is one of the great promises of the Internet.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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