According to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University does not want to participate in the copyright settlement agreed to by Google and publishers. The Crimson reports that
in a letter released to library staff, University Library Director Robert C. Darnton ’60 said that uncertainties in the settlement made it impossible for HUL to participate.
“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries,” Darnton wrote.
“The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable,” Darnton added, “especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”
He also said that the quality of the books may be a cause for concern, as “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research and education.”
Thanks to Garson O’Toole for the heads up.
I reject it too:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/the-great-book-bank-robbery/
And I hope thousands of other writers will too:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/is-another-suit-against-google-book-search-coming/
The Google Print settlement opens copyright sectors to Google vended service. Curiously the target source material remains print originals and the target repositories remain libraries and not publishers.
This proprietary virtual library plan leverages almost every attribute of print source material including the attribute of their survival or preservation by libraries. It also leverages the work of authorship and the investment of publishers. It also leverages Google’s position as the most capable delivery infrastructure. As to which investors will benefit most by on-line access, it is likely that libraries may benefit least. The library leverage still seems under positioned in all this. The preservation commitment and its cost, the collection building and classification, and the construction of access utilities have all been required to enable this on-line re-mining. Still other prerequisite services, known best by librarians and bibliographers have been overlooked. These are the contributions of producers of the print collections. Book designers, papermakers, compositors, printers and binders have not even been even acknowledged in this re-mining and revaluing of print collections.
The libraries can leverage the unrecognized and under-valued labor and skill of book producers. This can occur in context with on-line demand for print facsimile or on-demand book delivery. Here the resolution needed for paper delivery, the issues of permanence and durability, and the special appreciations of print production can be leveraged with library oversight and library revenue of facsimile print copy production. Such copy production may well require recapture from print masters.