Author Lewis Perdue is condensing his 347 different blogs into just three ( I don’t now how he can even do that — I have a hard enough time maintaining just one). His new, main blog is The Crock Pot. He’s keeping his DA VINCI CODE lawsuit blog and his Dan Brown blog as standalones. The inaugural Crock Pot post is about the Author’s Guild lawsuit against Google. Lew is one of the few authors to come out publicly in favor of Google scanning books without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holders.
From all the misleading sturm, drang und hype coming from the plaintiffs,
you’d think that Google was planning to out-pirate Johnny Depp by stealing every
published word on the planet and posting it on a Kazaa or BitTorrent
file-sharing service.But … no.
Google is being sued for having
the good sense to scan books in order to make them searchable online much as
Amazon has done. The books would then be available for purchase with appropriate
payments to copyright holders.Think back a little. When Amazon made books searchable, the industry freaked
out, afraid of a new idea that had dropped from the sky like a Coke bottle in
the African bush. I thought it was a good idea then and a better one now. My
books are searchable on Amazon and, if anything, it has helped sales. I’ve used
the Amazon searches for research and ended up buying books I would never have
considered otherwise.
I’ve used the Google book search and see that there’s really nothing to worry about. You can’t read the book, only a couple of pages, and the book search has clued me into books I would have otherwise ignored.