The Jason Salas Experience

One of the things that frustrates me most about certain aspects of people in media is how naive they can be towards the progress of the practice. I've blogged until my fingers started cramping and given lectures and speeches until I'm hoarse about how newspapers are a dying medium. The whole Google Print debacle and the opposition against Google's idea of digitizing mass amounts of printed works for the sake of making their content indexed and web-accessible just ticks me off.

Having studied intellectual property, I can see how not having the explicit permissions from all involved in the authoring, publication and distribution complicates the matter. But as a technologist, this has to be done.

The company plans to restart the scanning of in-copyright books on Nov. 1, according to Alexander Macgillivray, Google senior product and intellectual property counsel.

Google’s aim for Print is to make searchable the full text of as many of the world’s books as possible with the library portion of the project involving the scanning of books from five facilities — the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library and Oxford University. The arrangement with each library differs, with Michigan offering the entirety of its library, while both the New York Public Library and Oxford University are only making public domain library books available to Google for scanning, according to Macgillivray.

The archival benefits alone mandate that great (and not so great) works of literature, reference and entertainment be replicated in a more survivable format than the printed page. That Yahoo! would announce soon after the initial complaint was filed against Google that they'd be doing essentially the same thing just shows it's inevtiable. Everyone predicted this chain of events happening, and it all got started with the advent of the e-book.

Could print diehards be holding onto their platform, out of fear that the world's libraries will become ghost towns if everything one day is available via the Web? Perhaps. Is this a legal issue that'll be stuck in litigiation for insane amounts of time? Likely. Is this an argument that needs to be quashed so that progress can take place?

Absolutely.