Wake Up Call for Smaller Scale Digital Initiatives
July 24, 2009
Thank goodness I am not trying to get a small scale archiving or abstracting project off the ground. The story “Japanese E-library Project Could Lose Out to Google Book Search without Government Flex” in the Mainichi Daily News caused a number of thoughts to flap through the addled goose’s brain. The story asserted:
It is hoped that the Japanese government will flexibly proceed with legal revisions so as to facilitate online distribution of books’ content in Japan, including the e-library project.
I took a look at the Japanese original and could not make sense of Google’s transformation. Despite the prose in the Mainichi version, I concluded that Google operates at a government or nation state level. A library scale project is a non starter unless a motivated government jumps in to pay the cost of dig9itzation, transformation, and indexing. The commercial database publishers will the next group of entities to find themselves in Google’s pressure cooker. Commercial database publishers have been forced to innovate in pricing, packaging, and placement. Once these dinosaurs run out of wiggle room, the Google pressure cooker will infuse some excitement into these low profile operations.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2009
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