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!
Posted by mjm at October 23, 2005 06:46 PM