Google digitizing all books

[Edyta Bojanowska]

Perhaps Google does not systematically make the entire text of the books 
viewable, but it certainly is not very good about policing just how much 
of the text shows up. Last year some readers emailed me that they read 
my ENTIRE book on google.  After verifying that they indeed meant 
"entire," I asked my press to take the book off google (which they 
did).  The press's arrangement with Google had been that only a certain 
percentage of the book would be viewable, but google apparently is not 
very good about keeping to that percentage.

Perhaps a fully digitized age will one day arrive (I, for one, would 
regret it very much).  But in the meantime, the way we - let's define 
"we," as scholars in a rather small field - get published is through 
regular regular university presses, who are set up to recoup through 
sales the cost of the books they publish. University presses, as we all 
know, have in recent years moved to a model of profitability, no longer 
able (or willing) to serve as disinterested guardians of the spirit of 
scholarship (and there are complex forces that have compelled them to 
change their model). If of the very small circle of people who could 
conceivable be interested in my book, some get to read it free online, 
the amount of copies my book sells will be even smaller.  The next time 
my university press gets a proposal from a young scholar in Russian 
literature,  they will consult the number of copies that their other 
titles in Russian sold.   If these are low, no mater how brilliant and 
deserving a proposal, the odds will be stacked against the new author.  
I need not spell out the rest, of course, about tenure decisions hinging 
on one's ability to get one's book into print, etc., etc.  In short, 
free accessibility of books online may help to disseminate ideas that 
are currently in print, but it may also prevent other deserving ideas 
from ever entering the public domain. (Of course, one may, upon getting 
a refusal from university presses, post one's dissertation free of 
charge online, but this is not how we, scholars, currently stay employed).

Regards to the list,

Edyta Bojanowska

-- 

Edyta Bojanowska
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Rutgers University
195 College Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
phone: (732) 932-7201
fax: (732) 932-1111
http://german.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/bojanowska.htm

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