It never ceases to amaze me how dumb companies are. First we have the recording industry: digital music is bad–let’s sue everyone for illegally sharing/stealing music! They should have said, “Humm…this is an interesting technology. How can we use it to make more money? Maybe we should sell music online… And maybe the reason sales are going down is because we sign people like Ashlee Simpson.”
Now book publishers are at it [Read the CNN story Here]. Google is working on an index of books so people can search and find the things they need–like a big concordance. Google doesn’t plan to release copyrighted works, just portions of which are covered under “fair use” copyright provisions. The publishers in all their genius are now suing Google to stop the company. Some nonsense about copright infringement.
Why don’t the publishers say, “I think we can make more money if people can actually find the information they need and buy our books.” But likely it’s related to producing a lot of literature that simply is not worth reading; and if people knew that in advance, would they by the books? No.
It’s infuriating how companies I support financially (i.e. I buy books) can continue to live in the era of my grandparents. The concept of “this is how we have always done it and it was good” still reigns supreme in many areas of life: politics, business, technology, religion. Some changes are bad–some are good. But the key is to contemplate which changes are good and which ones are bad–not allowing yourself to be set in stone, endlessly clinging to the vestiges of the past.
And in this case, I feel the stakes are even higher. The amount of information is the world is mushrooming out of control–growing exponentially on a yearly basis. I don’t foresee our ability to deal with the volume of information in the world without technology to help us search through it.