She cut my heart out with a chainsaw.
I can see the upside of letting google turn every piece of literature every crafted into a searchable database for people to look through. The upside is obvious. What's ever wrong with spreading the wealth? Giving everyone easy access to the goods? In fact, you might even say its hard to find a DOWNSIDE to basically make it easy for everyone to smarten up if they so wish.
Not so much...
Publishers and authors would be losing control of distribution rights, basically making the works no longer theirs. And hell, all that bullshit up at the top only really works if you forget one thing - The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
And that, in and of itself, is the main problem I see. The whole IDEA behind Google doing this *unless i misread* was to let people read sections of the books, not the whole books - and then recommend to them Libraries where they could find the books. Great idea. Im sure it would work well in a Eutopia. But no, People would merely find what they need, take it. Use it. More often than not (the same usually goes for poetry) they would also use it as something it was never meant to be used as. You can twist words, but you can also twist ideas. Everyone knows you can use a quote to mislead people, hell I just did it (Thank you, Nietzsche!)
The conclusion - Google's trying to float a ship in the same water piracy, p2p programs have been sailing for a while now. You can defend it all you want - in fact, Ive said many times that Bearshare is a good way of taste-testing music so you dont buy bullshit. I REALLY try my hardest, if I download more than one song by someone and I like them both, I buy a CD or something. Maybe a button or sticker. Anything I can do to not feel like a freeloader. But the same thing would happen with this latest and greatest idea from everyone's favourite search engine - All those idealist ravings about how it would help spread the good word (like helping bands get their name out with file-sharing, or just some people who think music should be free anyway, and that artists should enjoy having their shit stolen) would turn to shit when the manipulative grimey hands of today's average internet user got all over it. People would be doing - hell, probably what Im doing - doing a little internet research and stealing short quotes to make yourself appear smarter than you really are. (And never reading the long ones cause they're far too profound for you to absorb anyway)
Im starting to blabber..
Not so much...
Publishers and authors would be losing control of distribution rights, basically making the works no longer theirs. And hell, all that bullshit up at the top only really works if you forget one thing - The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
And that, in and of itself, is the main problem I see. The whole IDEA behind Google doing this *unless i misread* was to let people read sections of the books, not the whole books - and then recommend to them Libraries where they could find the books. Great idea. Im sure it would work well in a Eutopia. But no, People would merely find what they need, take it. Use it. More often than not (the same usually goes for poetry) they would also use it as something it was never meant to be used as. You can twist words, but you can also twist ideas. Everyone knows you can use a quote to mislead people, hell I just did it (Thank you, Nietzsche!)
The conclusion - Google's trying to float a ship in the same water piracy, p2p programs have been sailing for a while now. You can defend it all you want - in fact, Ive said many times that Bearshare is a good way of taste-testing music so you dont buy bullshit. I REALLY try my hardest, if I download more than one song by someone and I like them both, I buy a CD or something. Maybe a button or sticker. Anything I can do to not feel like a freeloader. But the same thing would happen with this latest and greatest idea from everyone's favourite search engine - All those idealist ravings about how it would help spread the good word (like helping bands get their name out with file-sharing, or just some people who think music should be free anyway, and that artists should enjoy having their shit stolen) would turn to shit when the manipulative grimey hands of today's average internet user got all over it. People would be doing - hell, probably what Im doing - doing a little internet research and stealing short quotes to make yourself appear smarter than you really are. (And never reading the long ones cause they're far too profound for you to absorb anyway)
Im starting to blabber..