Lunch at the Labs

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is suing Google to prevent it from scanning and digitizing the world's books in order to create a searchable index. In an op-ed column The Point of Google Print in the Wall Street Journal of October 18 2005, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt responds to the publishers.

This seems to me to be yet another case of an antiquated business trying to hang on to the old way of doing things and failing to see new opportunities for making money. Remember in the Betamax case, the movie industry sued Sony to prevent use of the VCR and now video rentals are a great source of profit for them.

I find it interesting that web publishers will do anything to get indexed by Google while print publishers are opposing it. I think Google should have charged print publishers for scanning and indexing their books. Then it would seem valuable to them and when the publishers complained it was too costly for them, Google could have offered to do it for free. Then everyone would have been happy and the publishers would be thinking they are getting something for nothing, which they are!