Google’s Free Books Project Doesn’t Threaten Publishers

Google has made it free to download books that are no longer under copyright. Book publishers are quietly upset worrying that no one will buy their classics anymore. They needn’t worry. Google’s approach is more like a wine-tasting at a vineyard; give the public a chance to try a little for free, and they’ll buy what they like.

This journal (which makes its nominal revenue from the Google ads on each page), indeed, every journal, has a vested interest in a public that reads. Free books lower the cost of doing so, and Messrs. Shakespeare, Cervantes and Tolstoy have no need of royalty checks. Consequently, Google has simply made trying the classics free (presuming an internet connection). Democratization of literature cannot be a bad deal for anyone.

Now, if one wants to read Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, one needn’t try to track down a copy, pay good money for it and then learn that it is a fourth-rate work from a third-rate writer. One can simply call it up on the screen, and for free, discover the painful prose that went into telling this silly tale at dreadful length. To carry on the vineyard analogy, one can spit it out without having a case of it sitting around making one regret one's experimentation.

On the other hand, suppose the reader finds a work he or she enjoys. Printing it out on letter-size, single-sided paper doesn’t make for easy reading. A 500-page book would require 1,000 sheets and a sizable portion of a toner cartridge to print in full. If a ream of paper costs even $3, a $6-10 bound hardcover is competitive, and certain more manageable. The “collector’s editions” Twain, Dickens and Dumas (père et fils) in bookstores right now sell for less.

What Google has done is what radio did for music publishers and recording studios decades ago. True, the works of living writers and those whose estates still have copyrights are unaffected, at least directly. Yet, would it be unreasonable for someone who has discovered Joseph Conrad to go into a bookstore and pick up a couple of his books, and as an afterthought, grab something by Marcus Major, Morgan Llywelyn or E.L. Doctorow? Video may have killed the radio star, but the internet may yet save reading. Inshallah.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home