Google-book publishers rift widens

San Jose Mercury News: More on the rift between Google and book publishers. Excerpt:

Google's ambitious project launched last year to scan all sorts of books to make their contents available on the Internet set publishers snarling. Google's solution to the controversy has publishers snarling even more.

The Mountain View company has suspended the scanning but has given publishers until November to say which copyright material it can't use. That angered publishers, who say the Internet search engine is trying to upend copyright law. ...

The Association of American Publishers ... was in the process of finalizing its proposed compromise when Google grew impatient and asked to see a preview of it, Schroeder said. After reviewing it this week, she added, ``they said, `No, we don't think that will work.' ''

You can be almost certain that the book publishers' association's proposal was a regressive, backward-looking pile of do-nothingism, as evidenced by their claim that they can't get together a list of their own titles in three months' time. Hogwash.

Google is clearly on the public's side, while the publishers are hoping to do whatever they can to prevent these works from entering into a library-type system of public access (a far cry from the public domain).

The next time you hear AAP president Pat Schroeder claim that Google is only doing this to increase its profits, ask her: Would the AAP then be in favor of the nonprofit Internet Archive digitizing these books for the public welfare?

The silence will be defeaning.