Google Book Search and the Future of Access to Scholarly Books

Sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities

The Townsend Center for the Humanities is excited to announce the first lunch forum in the spring series on Digital Technology in Humanities Scholarship. Please join the conversation about Google Book Search next Monday with Pamela Samuelson. Joint professor at Berkeley's School of Law and School of Information, as well as director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Samuelson offers a critical viewpoint about the consequences of Google Books for academic researchers and libraries:

"The proposed settlement of the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit which charged Google with copyright infringement for scanning books from major research libraries would bring about much greater access to books. However, there are several reasons to be deeply worried about the settlement because of inadequate privacy protections, risks of price-gouging for institutional subscriptions, and antitrust problems. Beyond this, serious questions exist about whether a complex transformation of the market for digital books such as that envisioned in the proposed settlement can be achieved through a class action lawsuit when it is deeply legislative in nature."