Google's publishing free for all undermines our literary tradition; (London) Guardian, 9/19/10

Robert McCrum, (London) Guardian; Google's publishing free for all undermines our literary tradition: The 'dark threat of digitisation' is being underestimated, warns Robert McCrum, even by enlightened critics such as Andre Schiffrin:

"There's a lot that's passionate and useful in Schiffrin's anguished analysis. He is right to identify a healthy market as the key to a vital culture and vigorous democracy. His heart is certainly in the right place, but strangely, for a book entitled Words and Money, he never fully addresses the thorny question of "free", as articulated by Anderson, James Boyle (The Public Domain) and Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture). I wish he had because this goes to the heart of the crisis faced by print at the moment...

Johnson was right. Words that get written for money are likely to be superior to words spun out for nothing, on a whim. California's "free" movement wants to argue that literary copyright is an intolerable restriction of the public's right to access information, and that words should be free. That's a profound threat to the western intellectual tradition. I hope that André Schiffrin, having raised the alarm about the demise of serious publishing and journalism, will urgently turn his attention to the new, possibly darker, threat of digitisation and its consequences."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/19/literature-google-publishing-threat-mccrum