Siva Vaidhyanathan has posted on his blog, the Googlization of Everything, an interview he did with a Charlottesville newspaper. The interview reveals some of his concerns about Google. An example:
More than 20 big university libraries have signed contracts with Google, in which they’re allowing Google’s people to scan large collections of their materials… This concerns me because while the universities think they’re getting this great service for free, it’s Google that’s getting the gift. Google is getting hundreds of years of riches that the state of Michigan and California have funded. Google’s getting all this content for free and gets to control access to it, gets to control the manner of presentation, gets to control the formats and gets to control the terms of use. I think that’s a bad deal for these libraries.
Don’t all the libraries in question get the scanned texts for free too? Google control their copy, but the libraries control theirs (unless I’m mistaken).
(I should read the article…)