From the Letter to the Editor:

In his May 19 op-ed, “A Book Grab by Google,” Brewster Kahle said that a court settlement involving Google, if approved, “would produce not one but two court-sanctioned monopolies. Google will have permission to bring under its sole control information that has been accessible through public institutions for centuries. In essence, Google will be privatizing our libraries.”

As the steward of one of those libraries, a library that has had some 3 million of its works digitized by Google, let me assure readers that Google will not have a monopoly on the information that we hold. We retain the original copies, we have our own copy of the digital scans and we are free to scan the works again.

See Also: Full Text of the May, 14th Op-Ed by Brewster Kahle titled, “Google Book Grab.”

If approved, the settlement would produce not one but two court-sanctioned monopolies. Google will have permission to bring under its sole control information that has been accessible through public institutions for centuries. In essence, Google will be privatizing our libraries.

Source: Washington Post
Hat Tip: LS

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 and is filed under Digitization Projects, Libraries and Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.