Guest Blogger: Jim Epperson on Google Books

Reader Jim Epperson sent me a note about his experience with Google and the reason why he is not a fan of Google’s copyright infringement scheme. After hearing Jim’s story, I asked him to prepare a guest blog post for me for inclusion in this blog. Here’s Jim’s guest blog post:

Eric asked if I would write a guest post about my Google experience. First, some background:

I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a mathematics Ph.D. in 1980, and began my academic career at the University of Georgia. I later moved to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). While I began my career with typical dreams of setting the mathematical world on fire, by the mid-1990s I had come to terms with simply being a good but middling scholar and a fine instructor, tough but fair.

In 1997 I decided to write a textbook. This decision was made for a variety of reasons —dissatisfaction with existing books being a large one—but the prospect of additional income was certainly part of it. For two and a half years, through health crises, the birth of my son, and a career change and associated move to Ann Arbor, I worked on “my baby.” It appeared in the summer of 2001, and a Revised Edition came out in 2007.

Over the years it has brought in a non-trivial amount of money to the family coffers (not as much as I’d hoped, of course) and I am very proud of it as a piece of mathematical exposition. The expected future for the book might be another edition in a few years, then possibly a sale to a publisher like Dover which would keep the title in print at a much reduced price. Imagine my surprise when I discovered, on Friday afternoon, that Google had put my book up as part of its scanning project.

There’s a boatload of ways to react to this. The first is to honestly say that anyone who tried to use the online version of the book for a course (in lieu of purchasing the book) would be an idiot. In the first place, they only scanned in about 85% of the book; while most of the listings in the Table of Contents are active links, some are not. Even if the entire book were there, taking a course based on reading the book online would, IMO, be a recipe for disaster. But college students have tried dumb things before, so I would not doubt that someone, somewhere, will try to save the money that the book would cost, by using the online version as their text. (Given that it retails for $100, this is not surprising.) So Google is not only potentially taking money out of my pocket, they are enticing students to do educationally foolish things. Admittedly, there is an element of pride that my book was considered good enough for this project, although I could do without the ego boost in exchange for the royalties I might lose (and my understanding is they are scanning everything in the Stanford Library).

But, at the bottom, I feel more than a little violated. Almost as soon as I discovered that Google had scanned my book, I contacted my editor at John Wiley & Sons. Today I got a reply from one of her staff, explaining that Wiley had been part of the suit against Google, and so was part of the settlement. Based on her description of things, it appears possible that there might be some cash payment to me for this, although $25 million won’t go very far when split between so many books and authors. I’m not holding my breath…

I’ve got no problem with Google scanning in and uploading books that are public domain. That’s frankly a good idea, IMO. But this business of scanning in books currently under copyright, worst of all textbooks, strikes me as a gross violation of intellectual property rights. I’m surprised that Wiley and the other publishers were not able to find a good enough lawyer to beat Google in this.

I feel Jim’s pain, and I completely understand where he’s coming from. If any of you need any further reasons to oppose Google’s massive copyright infringement scheme and the proposed settlement, I hope that Jim has provided it to you.

Jim, thanks for taking the time to contribute.