It's About Learning

In the New York Times article A Library to Last Forever Sergey Brin the co-founder and technology president of Google explains Google’s position on the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers settlement and also attempts to dispel a few myths. Brin’s most poignent point clearly identifies the potential we have for loosing an enormous amount of our intellectual property if something like the Google Books project is not allowed to move forward:

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

Brin also points out that the Google settlement does not limit other organizations from doing the same thing and he hopes that Google efforts will blaze a trail for others to follow. The bottom line is that if Google or some other organization doesn’t make these out of books available we will eventually loose them. History doesn’t have to repeat it self.