The BBC Reports Google is resuming its controversial project to digitise millions of books and make them searchable on the net.
The search giant is pressing ahead with its plans despite growing legal pressure from publishers and authors.
See also: WSJ has a quote from the apparently clueless Gorman:
“Other librarians are more strongly opposed to the Google project. “I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels,” said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at California State University, Fresno. “They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue.”
Google restarts online books plan
It’s depressing to see comments like these from the president of the American Library Association. Gorman is well-known for his technophobia, but nonetheless his unwillingness to at least be sympathetic to efforts in the marketplace to increase access to information is just sad. Librarians have never owned the cultural records that they maintain, and we should be overjoyed that the forces of entrepreneurship and innovation inherent to the marketplace are being brought to bear on problems that librarians care about. Phooey to Michael Gorman.
He doesn’t get it
I really don’t think the ALA president gets one of the bigger underlying goals: making books easier to find, so that people can use them. It goes back to Ranganathan (sp?)…every book its reader and every reader his book. I would hate to be researching something, and not finding a lot of information on it or not knowing how to find it. Personally, it drive me crazy when I am pretty sure that something exists and I can’t find it.
I understand copyright concerns, among others with this project. But if a pretty simple search window (such as google) could tell me that there is a book that would be helpful, and provide the bibilographic information I need to see if my local library has it (so that I can see and use the whole of the book), then yay!.
I understand being technophobic (although I am not), but this isn’t just technical stuff…at least I see this as some theory wrt access.
I agree with Mr. Gorman
In very simple terms……
I am afraid this will be the end of the book.
A real paperback, hard cover, etc., page turning book.
Very sad to me.
The end of the book? I think not!
How is making it easier to search for relevant literature on the internet going cause books to disappear? You still need to get a hard copy of the book to read it. I spend a lot of time online but I could NEVER read whole book online or on the computer. I do not think that actual paper books are going away anytime soon.