Associations representing academic libraries have asked the Justice Department to oversee Google’s plans to create a vast digital library, the Library Journal reports. The associations are concerned that the company might charge high subscription prices to institutional libraries, straining their budgets. The next legal hearing on the plan is scheduled for February 18, 2010.
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3 Responses to Libraries Ask Justice Department to Supervise Prices in Google Book Deal
11159995 - December 18, 2009 at 7:24 am
Since there is no product on the market that is anything like what Google will be offering to libraries, by what standard is the judge going to be able to decide if the price is excessively high?—Sandy Thatcher, Penn State University Press
11250382 - December 21, 2009 at 10:53 am
The Justice Department has not business interfering in a private enterprise of this sort as there is no benchmark on which to base their interference.
mbelvadi - December 23, 2009 at 6:40 am
It would only strain their budgets if they choose to buy it. Libraries should be more worried about price increases in the products they already buy. Where’s the appeal to the government to regulate the prices of the other monopoly products that they are already compelled by their faculty to buy, the STM journals that charge thousands of dollars per year per subscription for content that the publishers essentially get for free from the universities’ own faculty?