From CNET News
More questions than answers on Google Books
By Tom Krazit
BERKELEY, Calif. — Google's Dan Clancy had patiently answered question after question regarding Google's' Book Search settlement with publishers and authors until late in the afternoon Friday, when he was finally left speechless.
Louis Trager, a reporter from Washington Internet Daily, asked Clancy what kind of message was sent when Google decided to "copy first and answer questions later." The question—for which there's no safe answer, if you're in Clancy's shoes—perhaps underscored the core of the opposition to the settlement, reached in October, after Google was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission....
Everyone agrees that a searchable digital library of out-of-print books would be a very valuable asset for the world. As any owner of an e-book reader such as Amazon.com's Kindle will tell you, the way we think about books is changing.
Think about it: libraries offer tons of out-of-print books, so it's not like the collective knowledge of those books is inaccessible. Yet that knowledge exists in millions of hard-bound individual silos.
What if we could make all that knowledge instantly accessible from anywhere in the world? And more importantly, what if researchers have the ability to analyze it?...