Much of the skepticism about the Google project has been related to pricing, with libraries and scholars fearing that initially favorable rates might later become prohibitive.
[Paul] Courant [Dean of Libraries, UMich] said that there were multiple protections against that. One is the arbitration process that Google has agreed to. The other, Courant said, is the free market. "There is nothing in the settlement that says these works can't be scanned again. Someone else can come and scan them," Courant said. "If the price on this is outrageous," he said, someone else will want to digitize the collections, and universities would probably be open to the idea.
Others who see positive aspects of the deal are more pessimistic. Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College who has written critically of Google's role in digitizing books, said that she understands why Michigan sees benefits to the deal. "More people will be able to discover otherwise unsearchable content, orphan works will be given a cot in the Google orphanage, and books that the library couldn't afford to scan will be digitized," she said.
But she said there are other issues at play. "The tragedy is that a single and very large corporation has struck a deal with publishers that turns Google into a massive distributor, and though they hold non-exclusive agreements and tell others they're free to take on the legal risks Google did and reap the rewards, that's not feasible.
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