Received the following from Dan D’Agostino: … you might want to look at this interview …. It’s the first detailed analysis I’ve seen of how Google Books would work with academic libraries. The bit about publishers using it to sell ebooks to academic libraries is quite significant, although, as he points out, the current deal wouldn’t allow new content. But clearly, for the future, it would be easy to see Google Books as a kind of one stop shop for all academic ebooks. Anyway, just a heads up: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6726978.html?rssid=191
Here’s one question from the article:
In August 2009, you published an estimate of the potential number of orphan works: 580,388. That’s far lower than others have estimated.
There is/was a lot of hysteria about the potential number of orphan titles—none of it based on fact—which, in my report I attribute to laziness. In contrast, I reviewed some pre-existing statistical information produced by Jean Peters for RR Bowker documenting the numbers of new titles published in the U.S. since 1920. While I estimated that “orphans” would be more prevalent among older titles, the total annual title output only exceeded 15,000 for the first time in 1960 (according to the source data); therefore, the universe of all titles published between 1920 and 1980 is actually relatively small. Publishing output only rapidly increased during the late 1980s and it is assumed that the majority of these titles will not be ‘orphans’ because copyright information is readily available and confirmable.
