Today in “The Slow Demise of All Media Not Digital” Google Books

See, the thing is, when you have more money than almost anybody (or any company) you can decide to blatantly disregard existing laws and do what you want.

So, remember when Google said it would start scanning books into an online digital database that anyone could access for free? Well, even though most of what’s in there can’t be seen completely (mostly you get “previews” of books, unless a particular work is out of copyright, then the whole thing is there) the Association of American Publishers and the Author’s Guild both decided to sue Google. It was announced today that Google has reached an agreement with both parties.

I know I usually come down on the side of more freedom in access to any type of media, but Google had to know they would be paying money out at some point, right? I suppose this way might have been easier than approaching the publishers and authors first and saying “hey we have this idea about putting up written content in a digital format.” Maybe Google figured publishers would be like the RIAA and take every opportunity to bitch and whine about how digital distribution is killing them (the publishers) and decided that just doing what they wanted would force the publishers along.

A bold move, and one very few companies could have gotten away with.

On a related note, the bookmines where I’m at have a Sony rep come in every Saturday to showcase their eReader to customers. I’m still convinced that such devices have a place but it won’t be fully established until the cost of digital books falls proportionally to that of ACTUAL books, just as mp3′s are priced substantially lower than physical CD’s.

Case in point, a grad student was in the store last week and was trying to find a copy of the complete short stories of Evelyn Waugh. The QP version is 640 pages, while the hardcover is over 700. It was just too big a book for him to buy because he could not readily travel with it. And there it is, in a nutshell, why the digital readers will survive. The academic world alone might (assuming full of themselves, heads up their a-holes professoring types actually accept some technology) be able to sustain a large enough demand. If I knew, as a freshman in college, I could buy one piece of equipment for a largish fee, then download every textbook I would need each semester for much less than the physical books would cost me, I’d have done it in a second and I might not have the back problems that I have today.

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