Entries tagged with “eff” from Tools of Change for Publishing

EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement

Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes that the Google Book Search settlement accomplishes a degree of access that litigation might have taken years to develop, but it also observes areas of concern: fair use, innovation, competition, access, public domain and privacy.

Innovation: It seems likely that the "nondisplay uses" of Google's scanned corpus of text will end up being far more important than anything else in the agreement. Imagine the kinds of things that data mining all the world's books might let Google's engineers build: automated translation, optical character recognition, voice recognition algorithms. And those are just the things we can think of today. Under the agreement, Google has unrestricted, royalty-free access to this corpus. The agreement gives libraries their own copy of the corpus, and allows them to make it available to "certified" researchers for "nonconsumptive" research, but will that be enough?

Full analysis available at EFF.org

Related Stories:

• Harvard Won't Permit Google Scans of In-Copyright Material
• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• Google Book Search: It's All About the Index

EFF Looks at the Big Questions Surrounding Digital Books

Peter Brantley
August 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a post on what the future of digital books portends for pubishers and consumers:

Skeptics should remember that it wasn't long ago that many predicted that CDs would never replace vinyl, and later that MP3s would never replace CDs. You can still find great record stores that specialize in vinyl, but the trend towards digital music has been steady and unstoppable. And the music industry has paid a huge price for their failure to embrace the new technology. After first ignoring new technologies, they then proceeded to try to sue innovators, restrict users with DRM copy protection and then punish fans with indiscriminate lawsuits, none of which did a thing to stop online sharing of music. Sales are down, illegal filesharing is up, and no one has found a way to unite the industry around monetizing the sharing of digital music (though EFF has suggested a Better Way Forward).

Will the same thing happen to the publishing industry as books become digital? If the trend continues, with better devices promising longer battery life and better screen resolution, digital books will become a force to be reckoned with. Are we doomed to watch the publishing industry run through the same gamut of bad decisions that have plagued the recording industry for the last few years?

Related Stories:

• Open Question: Have You Seen a Kindle in Public?
• The Pitfalls of Publishing's E-Reader Guessing Game
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• Charting the Pitfalls of DRM