Google and the Washington Post’s Use of the Word Monopoly
November 4, 2008
Does anyone care about the library market? There are some specialist firms, mostly stuck in the sub-$1.0 billion a year basement. These firms have been aggregated by Thomson and Reed Elsevier to create $7.0 to $9.0 billion revenues streams, but these outfits have been challenged to grow rapidly and find new markets. There is the leveraged Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, a company hoping that Google acquires it, giving the owner a big payday. And there is the dwindling number of highly specialized firms trying to survive in a world where library budgets are no longer automatically increased.
The Washington Post story by James Gibson “Google New Monopoly” leap frogs over the shallow analyses of Google “doing good”. Mr. Gibson goes to the heart of Google’s deal with publishers for book scanning. He wrote here:
By settling the case, Google has made it much more difficult for others to compete with its Book Search service. Of course, Google was already in a dominant position because few companies have the resources to scan all those millions of books. But even fewer have the additional funds needed to pay fees to all those copyright owners. The licenses are essentially a barrier to entry, and it’s possible that only Google will be able to surmount that barrier. Sure, Google now has to share its profits with publishers. But when a company has no competitors, there are plenty of profits to share.
I find this interesting and potentially troublesome for Google for three reasons:
- The Washington Post editors knowingly characterized the book scanning, optical character recognition, and the other bits and pieces of this Google operation as a monopoly. The way I read the word “new”, the Post editors accept as common knowledge Google’s possession of at least one other monopoly, maybe more.
- The companies in the library world are likely to face the grim prospect of Google picking off information domains one by one. Google already has a patent service, which is bad news for some vendors. Maybe Derwent and Questel will be okay, but the pressure will mount for smaller fish. Google for its part is probably unaware of the library ecosystem that it will disrupt, but the disruption has begun for Ebsco and HW Wilson unless these firms can innovate and pump revenues quickly.
- Traditional library vendors have largely failed to keep pace with technology and consistently priced their products so that most people wanting information cannot access these data directly. In Harrods Creek, I have to drive to the public library in downtown Louisville to access some information resources. Google is going to make more and more of this high value information available to me and others directly. Whether ad supported or on a subscription basis, I will buy from Google.
The bottomline, therefore, is that if one wants to make a case that Google is on the path to more than two monopolies, the Washington Post makes that story clear in my opinion. Frankly none of the traditional information vendors can slow or impede Google. Google won’t have to buy all of the companies, but it may buy one or two to get some expertise and certain content domains. For the rest of this small, but important industry, the writing is on the wall. Change or be pushed into the lumber room.
Stephen Arnold, November 4, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
