In today's news a large group of libraries in Boston have declined joining Google's book search effort to digitize public domain works and make them widely available on the Internet. Citing the search engine restrictions required by Google, the Boston consortium signed instead with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
You can read all about it in the New York Times.
The movement of books to the Internet is hardly new. Companies and private organizations have been quietly working to make books accessible through the Internet for several years now. Project Gutenburg is another effort to create free electronic books.
To test the availability of online documents I was able to find the following classics online with very little effort:
- Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, (etext, the University of Virginia)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, (ebooks, University of Adelaide)
- Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, (ebook, The Library of Economics and Liberty)
The digitizing trend does bring some business questions to mind:
- Will hardbook books (and traditional libraries) eventually become a thing of the past?
- What will this trend mean for freelance writers (such as myself)?
- What will this trend mean for book publishers and sellers?
Truthfully, I don't know the answers to these questions. Even though I like the idea of having content readily available, I sincerely hope that we will continue to have physical books and libraries in which to read them. As a writer, I don't think that ready access to books will diminish the demand for my writing services. If anything, I think that there is an increased demand for new materials online.
What about you? Do you use ebooks on a regular basis? What publishing trends do you predict?
Leave us a comment and let us know.
Image courtesy of PD Photo.org through Wikimedia Commons.
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