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Academe and the Google Book Settlement
November 30, 2009 | 10:42 am
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By Paul Biba
According to an article in eSchool News, academics have a “wait and see” attitude towards the Google Book Settlement.
They feel that Google Book Search won’t be of much use to undergraduate studies, especially during the first two years of college. The corpus of book will be primarily of use to researchers. They also express disappointment that foreign books have been removed from the settlement, and won’t set policies for campus libraries until all the legal challenges are over.
One library head said that this resource will only be a book if Google can keep down and cost of access and keep up the quality of book scans. The effect that Google’s de facto monopoly will have is also an open question that worries librarians.
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Comments:
If quality of book scans is an issue, then based on the reports of scan and OCR accuracy we’ve seen, academia probably won’t touch the Google scans for quite some time.
Sad, you’d think someone in academia would be concerned about the settlement’s violation of copyright law. I see little evidence of that. I’m thinking of dropping the Digital Campus podcast because those who host it don’t seem to have gotten past the clueless, “Gee, free books” stage. If they can’t get the settlement issues down right after over a year of debate, why listen to them on other topics?
Academia seems equally clueless about students, who’ll quickly adopt anything that’ll save them time and who could care less about quality of scans as long as they can toss in impressive seeming quotes from multiple sources with little effort. As with Wikipedia, they’ll find a lot of use for it in defiance of what their profs may say.
In the long term, the real issue is likely to be the distortion in research that results from one book coming up on the first page of search results, while a far better book appears on page 10 and is never consulted. The schemes Google uses to rank webpages don’t seem to work well with books.