

Gary Reback: Why the Technology Sector Should Care About Google Books - andrewpbrett
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/gary-reback-why-the-technology-sector-should-care-about-google-books/

======
jim-greer
The 2nd comment sums up my feelings pretty well:

"If the argument is: better these books not be available to anyone than to
have only Google have them, as it will make Google search too good — from my
own consumer point of view, that doesn’t carry a lot of weight. Please do not
seek to protect me from good search results.

If the argument is: Due to Google's activities, since we are on the precipice
of having these books become available through one party, it would be
preferable for them to be available to multiple parties, then I’d agree. But
that is hardly a point to demonize Google for. We wouldn’t be having this
discussion without their efforts."

------
fnid2
Well, Google is above the law. In fact, lots of large corporations are above
the law. Politicians are above the law.

What this google case does more than anything is support the idea of the
decline of a nation of laws. We are no longer a nation of laws, we are a
nation that rewards _law breakers_.

Google violated copyright law and are being permitted to benefit from that
violation and that means the law doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, not
if you're google anyway... or rich I suppose. I mean... what are the rules
about who is subject to the law and who isn't?

That's what I don't know anymore. Politicians can break the law and
corporations can break the law, but the people can't break the law...
Apparently, individuals can't even have manga or carry around arabic flash
cards.

It's really disgusting what is happening. It's not good.

------
ippisl
His argument about of long tail item's value for sell of mass market items, is
also true for any other market.

Amazon uses this in a clever way. For long tail items , it lets merchants sell
their wares at it's site , with little cost to amazon.This lets amazon control
the mass market sales.

But this can go further:now amazon controls the customer , and the data of the
niche market sales. If amazon find a scalable way into niche market sales , it
could easily disrupt all it's merchants.

------
ZeroGravitas
Slightly off topic: I use books.google.com to keep track of books I want to
read. Just recently that list of books got made public and retagged as
"favorites". What's going on there?

