Podcast: The Battle for the Books

Like many others, I was mesmerized by Google's digitization program and then by the litigation that followed.  The Copyright Clearance Center's Beyond the Book podcast has covered Google's efforts, the lawsuit, and the aftermath and given many of us a concise summary of what is occurring.  This 15-minute podcast entitled "The Battle for the Books" is an interview with journalist and attorney Jeff Roberts provides an overview of it all and some of the elements that you may not have considered (e.g., "East Coast against West Coast, Manhattan Island versus Silicon Valley, technology upstarts taking on publishing elites").  If you have not kept up with the lawsuit, this will be you quickly up-to-date and likely leave you wanting to know more.

This podcast is also, in essence, an introduction to Roberts book The Battle for the Books: Inside Google's Gambit to Create the World's Biggest Library.The book is available for the Kindle, which points at something that occurred over the last 10+ years; Google is not the dominate purveyor of books that we thought it might become.  Instead Amazon marshaled its forces and created an ebook distribution service that many of us use.