Short Circuit's Journal: I don't...quite...get it.

Why would any publisher be against the indexing of books in Google's system? As long as they don't make the full text available for free, I don't see the issue.

In fact, it would seem to me to be a boon. What author, particularly writers of non-fiction, wouldn't want a keyword search of his work available?

Let's say I want do write a research paper on Subject. I go to Google, and do a keyword search for books on Subject. Now I have a list of books, and I go to the library and check out said books on Subject. Or I request that the library stock them. Or I'm so interested in Subject that I buy the books from Amazon.com. I've contributed to an increase in traffic for those books, which increases that book's chances of getting bought.

Now, the only problem I can potentially see is that this opens up millions of old literature to contemporary interest, reducing demand for new literature. I can see where that would be a problem. But if I want recent information, I'll sort my search results by date, and get the latest and greatest, won't I?

Slippery Slope & Promotion Control

[SeanDuggan]

I think what worries these companies is a slippery slope. If Google can archive the full text of these books a) there's always the chance of somone tricking the system into yielding the full text whereupon that text is loosed upon the world without restriction and b) it sets a precedent for others to follow. Google may be doing no evil, but other companies might be up to more nefarious deeds, or might collapse with the equipment being sold at auction, data complete, at which point you have those electronic

Simple matter of control...

[YankeeInExile]

I think it is less complex than that. Indexing a work is considered producing a derivitave work, which is the exclusive purview of the copyright holder.

Allowing some third party to produce a derivitave work of your opus for free!, is in one corner setting a bad precedent (although copyright is not like other "guard it or lose it" protections), and in the other corner ostensibly denying the copyright holders some future income from their own indexing of that work.

And, finally, the most convtroversial part

Re:Simple matter of control...

[Short Circuit]

Good to hear from you again. Been a while. (Same ol' excuse. Been swamped.)

I see your point. I was going to argue that indexing the web made this moot, but the Web has things like robots.txt and HTTP header flags as voluntary opt-out methods.

Opt-outs

[SeanDuggan]

I was going to argue that indexing the web made this moot, but the Web has things like robots.txt and HTTP header flags as voluntary opt-out methods.
And Google has opt-outs available for the books too. Problem is, it's a case by case basis for each book and many publishers don't have easy lists of all of the books that they own. I would argue that the publishers ought to be able to do a blanket opt-out for all books marked as being published by them, at least until they can straighten things out a bit, bu