Columbia University Gets Googled

We were displeased to learn Columbia University is tumbling down the Google tube:

Columbia University has partnered with Google, Inc. to digitize select public domain printed volumes in the University Libraries’ collections and make them available online using Google Book Search. The digitization project will provide teachers, students, scholars, and readers around the world with an unprecedented ability to search, locate, and read books from the University's collections. The digital collection resulting from this project significantly advances Columbia’s ability to serve its academic community, as well as readers worldwide.

Why is Columbia giving up their collection to Google?

Why can't Columbia University digitize their own library and make it available online?

Why let Google be the arbiter of scholarship and research and the book depository of choice?

Google is a for-profit entity and their scanning of books in the public domain will be certainly be monetized -- and that inevitability will galvanize the misplaced good intentions of these historic universities that are all too lazy to know better than to toss their libraries away on the internet under the Google banner.

The Equalization Effect of Digital Publishing

Established mainstream authors like John Updike are furious with Google for scanning books into the public domain and they're angry with publishers that choose to sell electronic editions of books -- any book.

We argue authors like Updike are angry because their specialness in publication is being ravaged by the equanimity and the equality of the digital publishing, print-on-demand, business model creeping into the book world.

Where once these "Big Name" authors were King Makers with power and influence -- everyone can now play on the same ground as them as the playing field is leveled and leavened in favor of the everyday and the accessible.

You create power and wield it when you can narrow access to minds and to the control of thoughts.

If everyone in the room with you -- and even those out in the world at large -- can go toe-to-toe with you to compete for the hearts and ideas of an ever-widening readership, your star shines less, your book advances dwindle, and your awards and certificates are diminished as the power is equalized.

Be wary of anyone claiming electronic publishing is bad for reading -- and when you see that sort of strange protest -- look for the threat to the backend profit the protestor is making behind your back.