Baen releases the text of all their books in screen format as teaser material. Every hardback of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series includes a DVD with the complete text of every novel previously produced in that series.

Their marketing strategy is based on a belief in the value of the book itself. People want to hold them in their hands, they don’t want to stare at a screen. The people who steal the content wouldn’t have bought the book anyway.

There format has certainly worked for at least one author. David Weber’s book sales have skyrocketed, and he went from a relative unknown, to a genre-specific celebrity in a very short period of time.

Now, I don’t think this model is a good argument for the image industry, where the standard output IS digital, but it’s an interesting comparison to your stance, and I’d be interested in your response to them.

But please, don’t buy into the hype. There is a hell of a lot of totally inaccurate info out there.
-Leslie

Oh, and I totally agree with the Google and capitalism thing–the last thing they want is to kill capitalism as they stand to make too much money in that system. They do, however, spin their publicity to make it sound like they want “free” and “open” and “sharing” to rule the market, but that is just their cover. They want to make money…and lots of it.
-Leslie

In general, though, you’re correct. Google’s business model depends on their engine being able to search through content more efficiently than anyone else and/or being able to search through more content than anyone else. It’s therefore to their benefit when content of any sort becomes freely available online, as they can start indexing it and using it to make Google more relevant to the information consumer.

@Chad: Google is most certainly not interested in seeing the fall of capitalism. The AdWords/AdSense system that brings in the vast majority of Google’s revenue is a superb example of a free market system. They’ve done a very good job of designing a system where payment is indeed in accordance with productivity: the advertiser does not pay and Google does not earn when an ad is not helping the advertiser make money. They’ve even made a considerable effort to prevent information-arbitrage opportunities where experienced market participants gain an advantage due to their knowledge of high-performing keyword terms.

And that’s the _real_ problem with Google, from the photographer’s perspective. Google is or will be a major force towards eliminating the barriers-to-entry that have kept photography prices high. Why? Because being a “professional photographer” in the eyes of Google doesn’t require anything more than a couple of bucks for an AdWords account, a website that ranks highly for whatever reason, or an image library open to Google Image Search. Whereas you pretty much had to go through Getty or an agency that knew what the CODB was and knew what a fair price was, an inexperienced image buyer will now probably start with Google and end up who knows where.

(If you think about it from that perspective, it’s not Google that’s against capitalism. It’s photographers, with all their talk of undercutting neighbors and charging too little…)