[bookshare-discuss] Re: Fwd: info on google books, from jay m silverman
- From: "D Hubbard" <dhubb100@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 06:10:10 -0400
Interesting read. Barns and Nobel have an EReader now as well. You have to
pay for the books but at least they're accessible. I'm for anything that makes
knowledge more accessible to us so we too can be empowered. Why not?
Thanks.
-Diane
----- Original Message -----
From: Rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx
To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 8:53 PM
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Fwd: info on google books, from jay m silverman
Advocates: Google Books can bridge digital divide
Much of the discussion around Google's proposed book settlement has centered
on copyright law and competition. Advocates for access got their say Thursday.
A coalition of civil-rights and disability groups in favor of Google's
book-scanning project held a press conference Thursday to marshal support for
improving
access to knowledge, the key benefit of
Google's deal with authors and publishers to create a new kind of digital
library
. They fear that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain digital access to
knowledge previously stored in libraries at expensive universities or rich
communities
could be hampered by the
opposition to the settlement from some authors and privacy advocates.
Companies and organizations are rapidly lining up
on either side of the proposed settlement, reached last October, after Google
was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission
from rights holders. The deadline to submit comments has been extended to
next Tuesday as the result of the last-minute realization that the U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of New York had planned to take its servers
down for maintenance over the holiday weekend, though the
deadline for authors to opt out
of the settlement remains Friday.
Those opposing the settlement have perhaps protested most loudly over the
past six months, but Google put together a group of organizations who stand to
make huge gains, if the settlement is approved--and not the monetary kind--to
make their case on Thursday.
Blind people, for example, have access to
a special library run by the Library of Congress
that converts print books into formats readable by the visually impaired, but
that library--in existence since 1931--only has 70,000 texts, said Chris
Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the
Blind. If the settlement is approved in October, it will give "print-disabled"
people "access to more books than we have ever had in human history," he said.
Advocates for the blind
found themselves on the opposite side
of the Author's Guild, one of the parties to the Google settlement, earlier
this year, after the guild protested that the text-to-speech reader on Amazon's
Kindle could hurt the market for audiobooks, prompting Amazon to give control
of the feature to authors.
Settlement supporters like Lateef Mtima, a professor at Howard University,
compared the possibility of opening up access to the books to his experiences
growing up in Harlem in the 1960s, then transferring to
Stuyvesant High School
, a specialized school for gifted science and math students. His fellow
students at Stuyvesant had already been exposed to a great deal of the
literature
covered in English classes at the school, making Mtima realize that he had to
catch up to be competitive.
Providing digital access to literature and textbooks would allow libraries at
all schools to simply maintain PCs, rather than having to devote resources
toward acquiring and maintaining books, several supporters argued. Many
communities in poorer parts of the country don't have the resources to maintain
libraries competitive with those in richer communities, and lack of access to
knowledge makes it harder for students in those communities to learn, according
to Wade Henderson of the
Leadership Council on Civil Rights.
Whether or not Judge Denny Chin is swayed by these arguments remains to be
seen, since opponents who believe Google overstepped its bounds by scanning
copyright-protected
books will likely make the case that two wrongs don't make a right. Still,
they underscore exactly what is at stake with Google's library project: a chance
to transform the way the world accesses knowledge with an extremely difficult
undertaking that few companies or organizations outside of governments are
thought capable of matching at the present time.
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