RE: Darnton on the Google settlement

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

At 12:21 AM -0500 1/29/09, Rick Anderson wrote:
> > There is, alas, a very
> >      significant amount of labor involved for publishers to
> >      investigate what digital rights they have in the books Google
> >      has digitized and to negotiate with authors over display and
> >      other types of rights they share under the settlement. This is
> >      hardly just a "free ride" for publishers.
> True -- it's essentially a free ride for the general public, but not for
> publishers.  However, my understanding (which may be flawed) is that
> publishers who choose not to participate can withdraw their books from
> the program very easily, and therefore end up no worse off than they
> were before the project.
I'm not sure how easy it is for a publisher to withdraw books. The
publisher first has to identify which books in the database it can
claim to own. And even identifying which books the publisher has
published may not be so simple a task, especially for ones published
before ISBNs came into use in 1970. All the books published between
1923 and that date have to be searched by means other than ISBNs.