The Google Book deal
March 29th, 2009 by davidw
I just heard Robert Darnton on On The Media talking about the Google Book settlement. (Sorry, but I don’t yet see a link specifically to that interview.) Brilliant. The two things I’d recommend reading about this massive and massively important deal are Darnton’s piece in the NY Review of Books, and an article by James Grimmelmann.
The book settlement is hugely complex, hugely important, and overall a big step forward. But, the ur-cause of the issues many of us have with it is that it’s a settlement among authors, publishers and Google, which leaves readers, scholars, teachers — AKA the rest of us — out.
