Technology Writings: Throwing Google at the Book

I believe that google is definitely not the first to come up with the idea of providing digital books on the web, but who is more suitable to act on such an ambitious vision than the seach engine dominator, google? The article provides interesting arguements from both sides of the debate over google's rightfulness in conducting the digital book project.

In my opinion, google cannot argue that it is trying to benefit from the authors in a way that can potentially affect book sales; however, if the publishers and authors keep retaining a firm stance against digitizing book, they are more likely to be the eventual loser rather than google or even average tech-literate people, who are already pretty happy with the notorious P2P file sharing. This is to say that the book industry should peacefully sit down with google and devise a mutually benificial plan to migrate the industry from paper-and-ink to bits-and-bytes before illeagal file sharing gets hold of the market.

The book industry should simply realize that this media transition of books is inevitable. There might be some foreseeable lose to authors and publishers, but they should try to make the best out of the situation when it is still a creditable company like google that is taking the lead.