Friday, April 22, 2005
Google's Pandora's Box
Nigel Newton is CEO of Bloomsbury Publishers - home of Harry Potter - and no fool. He warns of I rather agree with Newton that Google Print’s mission statement of “organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible” sounds “more akin to something you would hear from governments or religion." Full report in Publishing Newsthe implications of Google Print’s digitisation programme ... opening “a Pandora’s box” that could lead to the “complete undermining of the intellectual and cultural tradition of the last 600 years”.
Some publishers assume the freedom to allow Amazon and Google to digitise texts by virtue of electronic rights clauses in contracts, but Newton argues that digitisation of whole texts goes way beyond ‘publicity’.
