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E-PrinceIn 2007, Princeton signed on as one of the partner libraries in the Google Books Search project. By the end of this six-year agreement, the University will have sent Google about one million books to be scanned. All of the ...(back to the article)
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Great idea.
I didn't know about any of this. Good editorial.
wow agreed, good edit.
Very tame editorial, and the comment that Google might prefer pop books to academic texts misses the point entirely. Google will be charging libraries for access to its massive collection of electronic texts, to which Princeton has contributed, and thereby profited Google far beyond even the ads that accompany book snippet previews. These digital books, then, that Google has acquired for free from idealistic institutions, are not at all free to the general public for the dissemination of knowledge, but available by expensive and restricted (one computer per library) subscription. Princeton and other universities have thus subsumed their holdings to a corporation that will profit from them at the expense of public libraries.
It would be interesting to know whether some of the texts that Princeton sent to Google, which are considered public domain in the US, are in fact still copyrighted in other countries. Firestone has massive foreign-language and foreign-publication resources. One of the biggest problems with the lawsuit is Google's audacious claim to books it had scanned in the US whose rightsholders lived abroad, which violates international copyright treaties; Germany and Japan, for example, have filed against Google.
Joining HathiTrust looks like an interesting alternative, but is not urgent in this pivotal moment in copyright and publishing law. Princeton could best benefit the ideals of academic freedom and public access to knowledge by standing against the Google suit and Google's arrogation to itself of books it does not own, access to those books, and the resulting profit.