American Library Assn. President Attacks Google Book Scanning

Google has yet another opponent to its book-scanning project, Michael Gorman, President of the American Library Association, who calls it "a potential disaster on several levels." Gorman told the Wall Street Journal that the project clearly violates copyright laws. Gorman made his statement in response to Google's re-starting the project, after a brief hiatus. Gorman was speaking for himself, not for the entire association, which has no official position on Google Print.

Gorman said Google's fair-use claim, that readers will only be able to read snippets of text from copyrighted books, is "ridiculous."

Gorman is the university librarian at California State University, Fresno, and a published author, and so he is uniquely qualified to speak on the matter. He opposes the project on both accounts.

From a librarian's point of view, he deems the project a bad idea, because, "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue."

As an author, he has even stronger opinions. "It's a flaunting of my intellectual property rights," he concludes.Gorman is right, as are the authors and publishers who are suing Google over the project. Yahoo and Microsoft are cooperating in a competing book-scanning project, in which only non copyrighted books will be scanned, and those books whose copyright holders want them scanned.

Google should listen to its critics and follow suit.