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Well, they don't want to show any restraint, AFAIK. The saga of clueless/greedy/whatever authors against technology is much larger than this particular case, e.g. just two days ago it was reported that the Author's Guild is seeking $2B from Google for book scanning and making snippets available, that's $750 for each book! Many authors back these efforts.

My (optimistic) feeling is that a small circle of businesses is brainwashing the authors, citing music piracy and the "success" of RIAA in suing pirates and the authors are taking the bait.



Why is $750 per book so outrageous? Books on average would make far more than that, so it doesn't seem completely out of the question.


$750 for book excerpts seems pretty outrageous to me. They're not putting a complete copy up.


$750 isn't outrageous... For the authors to pay to Google for that kind if publicity/advertising.


It's not specifically publicity or advertising though, is it? They're indexing the entire text and making that available publicly.


Most books don't break even. Also, many books scanned by google are not easily available, out of print, or out of copyright, so I would be very surprised if google is costing authors anything like $750 per book. In fact I would suspect, if anything, it will help drive book sales.


The other thing that crossed my mind is that Google is still making use of the books - I doubt that just making them available publicly is part of their plan. If they're also licensing them for spelling correction and translation, how does that affect the pricing?




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