When I first was hearing about Google's big scheme to digitize every book ever written, I was on the publisher's side--not in favor. Working in a job that required me to understand copyright laws to a certain extent, it seemed their goal was clearly in breach.
On the other side of the coin, though, I can't say that I would be entirely opposed to having every book available digitally. I don't think Google should take it upon themselves to do this without publishers' permission. Nor do I think they should have a monopoly. And this is not because I want to read whatever books I can for free, or have easy access to hack into them. I don't even want to read books digitally. I'd much rather read a book away from my computer.
However, there are great advantages to digital versions. For one, I've long wondered why there are never commercials on television for books. It seems such a shame, doesn't it? We get ads for all kinds of nonsense, but not for this. As I was contemplating this last night while watching a TV movie, it occurred to me that ads for movies include attention-grabbing snippets from the movie. This might be a little difficult to do with books. Sure, you could create mini visual scenes from the book, but the joy in the book for many people is the ability to imagine those things without having the media create the image for you. So it would seem more beneficial to advertise with readable snippets. How could this be done? Well, perhaps not so easily on television, but with a few digitized pages available on internet ads, it could be done.
Another reason I would love to have digitized books would be when it comes to writing a paper in which I have to quote books. I must say I would love to have searchable copies of all books available. The search engine is a fabulous invention.
Today, I am working on my thesis essay and have read a few of the books I'm using at least twice and flipped through trying to find the place where something happened on several occasions. I did this kind of thing quite a bit as an undergraduate, but not quite to the extent I have to now, I think--I mean for the same books, time after time. It does get kind of tiresome.
So today I am expressing my gratitude for Amazon because they have acquired rights to copy many books, including at least one that I have to use (found a second after the original post. Yea!). I searched Amazon for the book, then searched the book for some significant key words, and then opened my paper copy and read until I found what I needed. Ta da!
So, maybe now I'm a little torn about the Google thing. There are a number of books I'd like to quote from that aren't Amazon searchable. Could the publishers maybe possibly hurry up with digitizing everything?
Sometimes I'll write about my job, sometimes about my faith, sometimes about my hobbies, talents, miscellaneous interests. You'll see.
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